One Italian Summer

Pip and Shannon dreamed of living the good life. They wanted to slow down, grow their own food, and spend more time with the people they love. But jobs and responsibilities got in the way: their chooks died, their fruit rotted, and Pip ended up depressed and in therapy. So they did the only reasonable thing - they quit their jobs, pulled the children out of school and went searching for la dolce vita in Italy.



One Italian Summer is a warm, funny and often poignant story of a family's search for a better way of living in the homes and on the farms of strangers. Pip sleeps in a woodshed, feasts under a Tuscan sun, works like a tractor in Calabria and, eventually, finds her dream - though it's not at all the one she expected.

Pip Williams was born in London, grew up in Sydney, and now lives in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia with her family and an assortment of animals. She is the author of international bestselling novelThe Dictionary of Lost Words (2020) and its companion,The Bookbinder of Jericho (2023). Before she became a novelist,Pip spent most of her working life as a social researcher, studying what keeps us well and what helps us thrive These questions lead Pip and her family to a single summer in Italy that planted the seeds of her writing career, an experience she captures in her memoir,One Italian Summer.

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