The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy

Oppressed by the claustrophobia of domestic life, a family decides to sell up and go to Italy; to search for art and its meanings, for freedom from routine, for a different path into the future. Award-winning writer Rachel Cusk describes a three-month journey around the Italy of Raphael and rented villas, of the Piero della Francesca trail and the tourist furnaces of Amalfi, of soccer and the simple glories of pasta and gelato. With her husband and two children, she uncovers the mystery of a foreign language, the perils and pleasures of unbelonging, and the strange involvement of the personal and the universal. Both sharp and humane in its exploration of the desire to travel and to escape, of art and its inspirations, beauty and ugliness, and of the challenge of balancing domestic life with creativity, The Last Supper is an astonishing memoir.