Villa Coco: A Letter from Andrew Sean Greer

My dear PREM1ER members

What ever happened to the ‘charm novel’? You know, the kind of warm and funny story packed with characters and incident and description – something like Graham Greene used to call his ‘entertainments’, or Nancy Mitford wrote based on her eccentric family, or Gerald Durrell about his own? Patrick Dennis, Stella Gibbons, Dodie Smith, J.R. Ackerley. There used to be a kind of novel where you wanted to remain in its pages forever: a world in which even the worst of circumstances could provide a funny story and a sense of hope. A book to reread yearly as a balm to the soul.

We’ve certainly needed them the past few years. At least: I’ve needed them. But I couldn’t find many modern ones. 

So I decided to write one.

Luckily, I had a perfect subject. For two years, I was the Director of a Writer’s Residency about an hour east of Florence, working for an elderly friend and baronessa.. My memories of that time were preliminary sketches of what became an entirely fictional world of my creation. I erased the writers; I shielded my friend’s personal history and invented another; I made up a love interest and a stone marten and a baker. Soon I was in that giddy phase of writing where you simply can’t wait to see what happens tomorrow with the chickens or the paintings or the romance. It was a hoot and a half to write. I hope it’s as fun to read.

It is the story of a young American who, searching for a way to “take life seriously,” applies for a job as an archivist for an elderly baronessa in Tuscany. He arrives on a summer day and enters a house crammed with treasures and junk, peopled by eccentrics and presided over by a forbidding baronessa with secrets of her own. There, in addition to learning Italian and how to harvest an olive, he learns to take his days less seriously. And how to make some important decisions about love and life.

I’ve heard so many readers say, ‘I want a book to take my mind off things’. They ask for a funny book, or a charming book. I think what they mean is a book that is honest about life and yet can offer what sliver of hope the author believes in. A celebration of life. A book to cherish. I do hope that is what Villa Coco can be for you.

- Andrew Sean Greer (June 2026)