"A very funny sendup of Italian-cooking-holiday-romance novels" ( Publishers Weekly ). Gerald Samper, an effete English snob, has his own private hilltop in Tuscany where he whiles away his time working as a ghostwriter for celebrities and inventing wholly original culinary concoctions--including ice cream made with garlic and the bitter, herb-based liqueur known as Fernet Branca. But Gerald's idyll is about to be shattered by the arrival of Marta, on the run from a crime-riddled former Soviet republic, as a series of misunderstandings brings this odd couple into ever closer and more disastrous proximity . . . "Provokes the sort of indecorous involuntary laughter that has more in common with sneezing than chuckling. Imagine a British John Waters crossed with David Sedaris."-- The New York Times