Book description
Taut, honed and surprising' Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan
Sun Thirtysomething New Yorker Lucy Stark leads a quiet, solitary life
working for a bestselling - but remarkably untalented - writer. When he
dies at a villa in Tuscany, Lucy flies to Italy to settle his affairs.
What begins as a grim chore soon threatens her self-reliance and her
very sense of reality. In Italian Fever, Valerie Martin evokes a modern
woman's headlong tumble into a world where E. M.Forster's angels feared
to tread. Smart and sophisticated, this novel takes us on a journey from
which we return, like Lucy, utterly changed. Valerie Martin is the
author of a number of collections of short fiction and novels, including
Italian Fever, The Great Divorce and Mary Reilly [the Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde story, from the viewpoint of a housemaid, which was filmed with
Julia Roberts and John Malkovich. Her most recent book is a non-fiction
work about St Francis of Assisi: Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St
Francis. She lives in upstate New York.
