Taut, honed and surprising Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan SunThirtysomething 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 asa grim chore soon threatens her self-reliance and her very sense of reality.In Italian Fever, Valerie Martin evokes a modern womans headlong tumble into a world where E.M.Forsters angels feared to tread. Smart and sophisticated, this novel takes us on a journey from which we return, like Lucy, utterly changed.