'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 one of America's finest contemporary novelists, best known for her Orange Prize-winning Property and also the acclaimed Mary Reilly , which was filmed by Stephen Frears. Her most recent novel, her tenth, is The Ghost of the Mary Celeste .
She is the author of three collections of short stories and Salvation , a biography of St Francis.
www.valeriemartinonline.com