Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

What the blurb on the back says...

'When Annie Hawes buys a hillside cottage in Italy for no more than the price of a dodgy second-hand car, a capable young Englishwoman becomes a surprisingly incapable Ligurian signorina...

 

In the overgrown garden of a small, stone house amongst the olive groves of Liguria, high about the Mediterranean, a curious combination of bonfire dinner and business meetings occurs. In the area by chance, Annie and her sister have no intention of moving to the Italian Riveria. Still, they eat the fragrant, rosemary-skewered sausages, drink perhaps a little too much of the local wine, allow themselves to be taken on a moonlit tour of the ramshackle house and garden...and fall in love with it all.

 

Their new neighbours are baffled - how have these Foreign Females survived without learn ing to spot wild asparagus or tell good mushrooms from bad? Don't they have any idea how to get their year's supply of olive oil from a couple of dozen olive trees, or good wine from bramble-choked vines? Fortunately, the hard-core olive-farming folk of Diano San Pietro are on hand to ply them with huge meals, plenty of ridicule and all the old-fashioned know-how they need to get by.'

 

What I thought of it..

A completely magical read from start to finish! I LOVED this book. It invoked so many wonderful images. A real escapism type book.