​​​​​BookLife 2024 Prize Finalist

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Miranda July meets Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins in this dreamy literary gem with a razor-sharp edge and "almost painterly" (BookLife), mesmeric prose.

Middle-aged, middling academic Helen Bonaparte has left her husband and children at home for a week-long Italian group tour with a bunch of strangers. Craving solitude, she intends to sulk in the corners of buses and museums for a week, indulging in great art but scowling the rest of the world away.

Until, that is, she meets Marieke, the tour guide, who becomes the object of erotic fantasies Helen didn't even know she had, and now can't keep at bay-to the point of distraction.

As each day passes, Helen's home life recedes, only to be replaced with increasingly bizarre, invasive, and secretive ways to get closer to Marieke. Helen lives in a breathless state suspense, hungry for Marieke's approval, devouring every brush of the hand or unassuming gaze. She switches their forks, steals Marieke's scarf, listens to her in a bathroom stall, anything just to get closer to the flowing blond hair and green sweater.

As Helen meanders around tourist gems of Renaissance Italy, experiencing the moving sight of David and the masterpieces of the Uffizi, she must come to terms with her new obsession, existing just on the border of dream and disillusionment, the imaginative and the mundane, the sacred and the profane.

Helen Bonaparte meanders along the edges of female desire, fantasy, and sexuality, delighting in the peculiar and indulging in the female gaze, for a change.