L’estate in cui fiorirono le fragole

An ironic and amusing novel, halfway between a fairy tale and a comedy. With The summer
when strawberries bloomed the author is capable of creating, with a light and ironic touch, a
human community filled with original and extravagant characters.It seems a summer like many others in the small village of Tigliobianco: the old ladies poke their nose in everyone’s business, the children run wild, the ladies from the Book Club annoy the librarian… But then Villa Edera, the Victorian dwelling at the edge of the village, is rented for a couple weeks to Priscilla Greenwood, a romance novel author of great success in a crisis of inspiration, who is looking for calmness and anonymity to find a way of getting rid of Calliope of the Topaz, her cheesy and fiery protagonist. Things in Tigliobianco, however, don’t go as Priscilla planned: gossips at war, disappeared cats, young girls who want to become detectives, smuggled letters, a mythical recipe notebook, lost for years, that contains the secret to the most delicious cake in the world, the Supreme, not to mention the Strawberry Competition, that takes place every year on the last Sunday of July and where the whole village competes with strawberry cakes. And Cesare Burello, the plastic surgeon on holiday in his home town… That’s how Priscilla finds herself tangled up in a real romance novel cliché. What should she do? Run or give a chance to Cesare who looks like a carbon copy of Roger MacMillan, the charming protagonist of the Harmony novel she wrote? Between nighttime picnics, conspiracies and an exquisitely literary treasure hunt, Priscilla will have to deal with the question that has been tormenting her forever: is it true that real life can’t be like a novel? And meanwhile, what happened to the legendary recipe of the Supreme, the most delicious cake in the world, disappeared into thin air thirty years before, and to which Cesare’s fate seems connected?