Villa Coco

A young man with an undistinguished college record and a fresh determination to live a serious life takes a job as an archivist in the Tuscan hills. His employer is the Baronessa, called Coco by her friends, a ninety-two-year-old with a flamboyant streak and no intention of acting her age. The job description is vague, and he soon becomes her all-purpose assistant at a villa that is slowly falling apart.

His official task is to catalog the villa's large collection of art and antiques, though objects keep disappearing under his nose. Around him swirls a loud, colorful crowd: princesses fond of gin, handymen no one can understand, boarhunters wandering the countryside, nuns, and assorted other locals. Against his own good sense, he also falls into an affair with a married man, which throws his careful plans for the future into doubt.

Then Coco suffers a loss, and she sets in motion a last grand scheme: to find the love of her life and be reunited with him before time runs out. Without quite meaning to, the young man becomes her accomplice.

Andrew Sean Greer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less, brings the same wit and warmth to this novel. It is a sunny, bawdy Mediterranean story about how seriously a person should take themselves, and about growing into the self you always hoped to be.