'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.