The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy

Casting off an English winter and an orderly life, a family decide 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.
Rachel Cusk describes a three-month journey around the Italy of Raphael and rental villas, of the Piero della Francesca trail and the tourist furnaces of Amalfi, of food and football and fantastical ice cream. With her husband and two children, she uncovers the mystery of a foreign language, the need for friendship, the perils and pleasures of unbelonging, 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.