"Award-winning novelist Michiel Heyns is back with a darkly comic tale. When a young South African literary scholar, Michael Marcussi, is offered, via a Facebook contact, a house in the Tuscan village of Gianocini, he accepts with alacrity: this is just the space and quiet he needs to complete his study of Literary Representations of Tuscany. But even before he has boarded his plane at Stansted Airport, things start vexing him: an obnoxious old man jumps the boarding queue, and Michael is given the evil eye by a belligerent bovver boy covered in tattoos."--Back cover.