Around them are the canals and lagoons of Venice, a city which becomes a character in the novel in its own right. Poised delicately on the line between tragedy and comedy, Fruttero and Lucentini compose in this novel “a sort of Wagnerian motif held aloft by Mozart’s hands.” Written with elegance and wit, this is an atypical, sophisticated, elaborate novel of love and the criminal shenanigans of the Italian art world. But, at the story's core lies the deeply intriguing mystery of the guide’s true identity.
Authors: Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini were a well-known literary duo in Italy for several decades until Lucentini’s death (by suicide) in 2002. For about forty years they co-wrote newspaper and magazine articles, literary essays, edited numerous anthologies and published six groundbreaking and best-selling mystery novels. Their first novel, The Sunday Woman, was made into a film in 1975 starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Louis Trintignant. The Lover of No Fixed Abode, first published in 1986, is the fourth of their novels.
Translator: Gregory Dowling grew up in Bristol, UK. He read English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford. He moved to Italy after graduating and has lived there since 1979, teaching in Naples, Siena, Verona and eventually Venice, where he has lived since 1981. Gregory is now Associate Professor of American Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He published four thrillers in the 1980s and 1990s and then devoted himself to academic work and translation. He returned to fiction in 2015, with his novel set in 18th-century Venice, Ascension. The Four Horsemen, the sequel to Ascension, came out in 2017.