A Midsummer Tuscan Dream

Danny comes to Tuscany from the United States in the early 1980s. He is running away from a war he didn't want to fight and trying to write a novel he can't finish. He gets an old Fiat 500, an apartment in an old farmhouse, and - one afternoon - a woman who walks out of the woods as if Edgar Allan Poe had created her. Bridget doesn't explain herself. She cooks, she sings in Gaelic, she looks toward the horizon as if listening for something only she can hear.When Bridget disappears into the machinery of Italian bureaucracy, Danny discovers that some silences carry meaning, and that some ghosts refuse to be forgotten. Dreamlike and gothic in its restraint, attentive to the quiet mechanics of displacement, A Midsummer Tuscan Dream is a short, luminous novel that moves to the sound of a Gaelic song and listens, patiently, for what the dead are still trying to say.