These are my prescriptions for a strong dose of joy. The quiet village of Silverstream is upended when a wildly successful novel is published depicting the antics of characters far too familiar to be coincidence. Silverstream's matrons are up in arms, launching a manhunt for the culprit. It is a tonic from beginning to end.
Juliet, Naked contains one of the most spectacularly hilarious and maddeningly awful boyfriends in contemporary literature. Duncan has an all-consuming obsession with Tucker Crowe, a reclusive American singer-songwriter, and Duncan's longsuffering girlfriend Annie is forced to live, in a way, with both of them. There is gentle wish fulfilment when Tucker Crowe himself connects with lonely Annie, and a friendship ensues that sustains and empowers each of them. Sheer pleasure.
Oddly, another novel in which celebrities collide with civilians. Pasquale runs the hotel Adequate View in a tiny Italian village, to which tourists mostly come by accident, thinking it somewhere else. It is about this earnest, gentlemanly hotelier and his modest dreams of a cliffside tennis court, but it is also about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, failure and comebacks, writing, success, fatherhood, and second chances.
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