Pulitzer Winner Sets Novel in Italian Writers' Retreat

The Guardian's books critic has reviewed Villa Coco, the latest novel by Andrew Sean Greer, the Pulitzer Prize winner whose 2017 debut Less became an international success. Set in Italy and inspired by Greer's two-year tenure directing the Santa Maddalena Foundation—a residency for writers in Tuscany—the novel takes the familiar premise of the artist abroad and renders it as a study in insecurity, self-discovery and the comedy of displacement. The Guardian describes it as a "breezy confection of fish-out-of-water wit," a portrait of someone seeking purpose in what appears to be an Italian paradise.

The Santa Maddalena Foundation, located near Florence, has long attracted English-language writers seeking time away from commercial and domestic pressures. Greer's direct experience running such a space—managing the expectations of resident writers, the rhythms of creative work, the peculiar intimacy of a retreat—becomes the novel's raw material. What emerges, according to the review, is not a straightforward celebration of Italian escape but a more complicated exploration of why writers seek such refuges and what they find—or fail to find—once they arrive.