Extra Virgin

When Annie Hawes buys a hillside cottage in Italy for no more than the price of a dodgy second-hand car, a capable young Englishwoman becomes a surprisingly incapable Ligurian "signorina"...In the overgrown garden of a small, stone house amongst the olive groves of Liguria, high above the Mediterranean, a curious combination of bonfire dinner and business meeting occurs.

In the area by chance, Annie and her sister have no intention of moving to the Italian Riviera.

Still, they eat the fragrant, rosemary-skewered sausages, drink (perhaps a little too much of) the wine, and allow themselves to be taken on a moonlit tour of the ramshackle house and garden ... and fall in love with it all.Their new neighbours are baffled - how have these Foreign Females survived without learning to spot wild asparagus or tell good mushrooms from bad?

Don't they have "any" idea how to get a supply of olive oil from a couple of dozen olive trees, or good wine from bramble-choked vines?

Fortunately the hard-core olive-farming folk of Diano San Pietro are on hand to ply them with huge meals, plenty of ridicule and all the old-fashioned know-how they'll need to get by.