IT isn’t every author who can say that her latest novel was inspired by the kidnap of her godfather by Sardinian bandits.

The abduction happened in 1968. The man’s young son, who was also taken, was freed after a few days, but he himself remained captive. As the author and actor Sara Alexander explains, the kidnapping of her godfather, a hard-working family man, made headlines on the island and spurred outrage in his town of Ozieri; his neighbours marched in protest and volunteered for daily search parties. His family flatly refused to pay any ransom.

The man was released, unharmed, after a month, but the abduction had, naturally, a lasting impact on the family - something that Alexander has expertly woven into her third novel, The Last Concerto.

The story revolves around a young girl, Alba Fresu. She had been tasked with accompanying her father to the vineyard, but she had lost track of time, and her brother, Marcellino, had gone in her place. As in real life, bandits abducted father and son, earning Alba a beating from her mother “that should have been reserved for the making of bread or churning of butter alone.” The young girl ends up being more marginalised than had previously been the case, but through the ministrations of a kindly local woman she discovers that she has a genuine talent for the piano. The book follows her life and career at ten-year-intervals, from novice to gilded global superstar.

“The abduction had a massive effect on the family, it goes without saying”, says Alexander, who herself is British-Sardinian, and was born in London (“a leafy part of north-west London”). “But from my child’s eyes, it made Sardinia quite a terrifying place. People were scared of the dark because [bad] people might be in the bushes.

“My memory was like, there literally are people in the bushes, because they kidnapped him, a few years before I was born.

“Kidnapping was rife in that period”, Alexander observes. In the 1960s particularly, bandits made a habit of abducting wealthy Americans who visited a certain part of the island.

“He was a bit of a hero as well”, she says of her godfather. “He did wear the experience as a sort of badge of honour, and as I grew older it really fascinated me.

“Watching the ripples on his then-adult children, I was interested in how it affected them. Each of them were different. And so Alba was born from me noticing a kind of even deeper diffidence than was usually the case in Sardinia - there was a deeper mistrust of everything and everybody.

“I thought that that characteristic would lend itself to a musician quite perfectly, because where words are missing, there’s music. That’s how she was born: I noticed there was a kind of warped pride at having survived the kidnapping.

“My godfather was a hero because he came back. Not everyone came back, and certainly they didn’t come back intact. Most people had an ear missing, or a finger. [The bandits] would literally send a finger in the post.

A further echo in the book comes from the fact that, like Alba’s father, Alexander’s godfather later attended victim support groups and even took part in a forgiveness exercise with the bandit who had kidnapped him. When the latter turned out to be a drug baron, and was sent to jail, the godfather felt such a deep sense of betrayal that his entire life was thrown into turmoil.

The abduction is not the only part of Alexander’s background that informs The Last Concerto, one that is evident from a dedication at the start of the book: ‘For mum & dad, thank you for the piano’, it reads. (She first played a piano at the age of six). There’s also a quotation from Maya Angelou that summarises Alba’s situation: ‘Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.’

After attending Hampstead Comprehensive School and the University of Bristol, where she obtained a BA Hons in theatre, film and television, Alexander completed her postgraduate diploma in acting at the Drama Studio London, among whose alumni are Emily Watson.

Alexander was only nine years old when she secured her first professional acting job, with Janet McTeer playing her mother in an RSC production. She has regularly appeared on stage, taking part in RSC, National Theatre and European tours. Her TV work includes guest-spots on Dr Who; her film work includes the role of Annetta, in the late Franco Zeffirelli’s 1993 film, Sparrow, which is set in 19th century Italy. In Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, Part One, Alexander appears as, in her own words, “the moody headphone-wearing Italian waitress in the infamous café fight scene”.

One of the more striking characters in The Last Concerto, it turns out, is a film director named Francesco. Though not directly based on Zeffirelli, he is, Alexander says, “a whole amalgamation of any extremely flamboyant directors I’ve ever worked with - and I’ve met several.

“My experience of filming with Zeffirelli [who died in June, aged 96] was interesting. There were times when everything would literally stop and we’d have a big feast. That was amazing.

“I had a very small part in Swallow, which was quite a big production, and I could afford the time to watch, and get to know, the crew. I’ve never been a starlet at the hands of a director like that.

“I did have the pleasure of going to his villa to do some dubbing after the production was being edited. The scene where Alba goes to Francesco’s villa in the book is entirely based on Franco’s, especially with the pictures of all the stars on the sideboard.

“I was a 17-year-old Londoner”, she adds. “The difference between Alba and me is that I totally understood where I was. I understood the weight of that history, and I knew I wanted to be an actor. For me, it was utter magic.

“However, Zeffirelli told me that I would never be an actress, because my voice was horrendous and I sounded like a mouse. He was right, but other people might have said, ‘Make sure you get trained, because you need to be trained’.” She laughs. “So that’s my claim: Zeffirelli told me I would never be an actress”. How wrong he was, though.

The Last Concerto follows on from two other Italy-set novels, The Secret Legacy and Under a Sardinian Sky. Alexander speaks enthusiastically of Sardinia, a place she knows well.

“What resonates for me is the complexity of the people and the leaning into mysticism. Even the most jovial of my Sardinian relatives keep a lot very close to their chests. One of my closest cousins, who has read the new book, said I captured it all accurately.

“The people are molten. They’re magma, bubbling on top. They’re like a rock, and that echoes the in the landscape, The beaches are beautiful but the island is craggy, and it’s wild. It’s not ordered. It’s a little bit unpredictable.

“They are the renegade island. Nowadays, visitors go there because it’s gorgeous, but they’ll go to a tiny little bit in the north-east coast, where the celebrities go. That’s what Sardinia has become known for, but it is largely untouched. It is its own character.

“Italy became unified in the 1860s but it kind of imploded for many Sardinians.

We’re not actually Italians, in a sense: we are this island.”

The Last Concerto is published in paperback by HQ, £7.99.

http://www.saraalexander.net/