Sad or stressed? I promise this book will make you feel better

Feeling battered by the world? Andrew Sean Greer makes the case for the forgotten art of the charm novel.

You know where you’d rather be right now? Not doomscrolling. Not checking your bank balance. Not staring at the group chat you’ve ignored for so long that it’s now easier to just never open it again.

You’d rather be in a stone villa in the Tuscan hills, drinking a glass of chianti beneath ivy-dappled light, gazing across vineyards and olive groves as an eccentric aristocrat tells stories of disastrous love affairs.

Luckily, that’s exactly where Andrew Sean Greer wants to take you. The Pulitzer Prize-winner’s new novel, Villa Coco, is the literary equivalent of being wrapped in a big warm hug and told, “There, there, rest now, little one”.

At a time when so many contemporary novels seem to speak in the internet’s house style – ironic, cynical, exhausted, distracted – Villa Coco offers a reprieve of humour and delight that feels almost radical. Or, at least, welcome.

Which is precisely the point. Greer wanted to write the sort of story readers could disappear into; a world they would not want to leave. A novel, he says, filled with sunlight.

“I thought about wanting readers to remember what it’s like to have a delightful reading experience rather than just an important one,” Greer, 55, says. “It is, of course, great to re-read War and Peace but sometimes you want to be just charmed for days and released from the cares of your own life and of the world.”

In Villa Coco a fresh American graduate with a degree in archives and record management – who is “in no way prepared for the crucial final exam of Real Life” – has decided it’s time to get serious. When his college adviser suggests he reply to a job ad from an Italian baroness seeking someone to catalogue books, artworks and antiques, he thinks: “What could be more serious than Europe?”

He heads to the Tuscan hills to assist the wonderfully unpredictable 92-year-old Baronessa Lisbetta – known to all as Coco – who promptly nicknames him Giovedi (Thursday) because he is to be her “man Friday”. While he tries heroically to discover what he is there to catalogue, Coco has absolutely no interest in being organised. Instead, he stumbles into her world of schemes, enchantments and adventures with a logic all its own (for example: one must never, under any circumstances, put a hat on a bed).

Coco is based on a real, larger-than-life character. Greer first met Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte in 2005 when she invited him to stay at her famed Tuscan writers’ retreat Santa Maddalena, which has welcome