THE OLIVE SEASON

She came to Tuscany to disappear. Instead, she was found.Sylvie Marsh has it all - a prestigious Sydney architecture practice, a track record that commands respect, a life built entirely around results. What she doesn't have is herself. When her body finally refuses to cooperate and she collapses at her desk on a Thursday evening, her doctor delivers the only prescription that matters: stop. Not slow down. Stop.She books a stone farmhouse in the Val d'Orcia and arrives depleted, wary, and entirely without a plan. What she finds there is Rosa - who feeds her without ceremony and asks nothing - and the particular mercy of Tuscan light, which shows everything as it actually is.And then there is Valentina.A Florentine art restorer who spends her days recovering what damage and time have obscured, Valentina arrives at the farmhouse each week with olive oil and wine and an accuracy about people that Sylvie finds both inconvenient and impossible to look away from. She is not what Sylvie expected. She is not what Sylvie planned for. She is, it turns out, exactly what the original underneath all the overpainting had been waiting to find.The Olive Season is a deeply sensory, emotionally layered novel about burnout, beauty, and the specific courage it takes to want something again. Set against the frescoed chapels, olive groves, and Renaissance piazzas of Tuscany, it is a love story for women in their forties who have given everything to the wrong things - and are only now learning what the right ones feel like.Warm. Precise. Quietly devastating. A novel that stays with you long after the last page.

Pagina's: 123, Paperback, Independently published