Lovely, gentle Isabel, just 40, makes masks. Her husband Dan, erstwhile ‘student of the Classics’ and playwright manqué, is ‘bored by the import-export business’. Enter long lost, lonely Bert, who ‘left soldiering, a distinguished colonel, and went to work for an oil company in New York’, plus Isabel’s unlikely friend and marriage-predator, thirtysomething Carlotta, who boasts a red dress, Mercedes coupé, unspecified high-powered job and ‘amazing (yes, amazing, I know) breasts’.
Master your disappointment. The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice (Hale, £9.99) is as far from the fantasy-relocation genre of hapless writer transposed to sunny European idyll with cast of gurning locals and comic anecdotes involving insects as Prospero’s unnamed island was from Stratford. Mercifully, Polly Coles stuck to a year’s tenancy; she and her Italian husband were gainfully employed, her children are normal and she can write, fantastically well. Having a lot of baggage in Venice isn’t great — it trips you up, impedes your enjoyment and sours your reception as you lug and lumber. Coles clearly has ample knowledge but also the wit to have travelled light.
‘All human life is binary’, explains a Vestal Virgin to the time-travelling heroine of Ranjit Bolt’s verse novel, Losing It. Young and lovely, Lucy’s plan is to lose her virginity. Entertainingly delivered, it’s an engaging subject, universal and rich in comic scope. Bolt’s burlesque is a frolicsome addition to a scanty genre, reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales via Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’. He plunders deep erudition for this bawdy bildungsroman; not so much virtue rewarded as its abandonment thwarted.