Two city dwellers share a familiar fantasy: to flee their frenzied routine and start a new life in some perfect foreign location, the vineyards of Italy. But when Tony and his wife, Mira, take the plunge and sink their life savings into a ruined farmhouse in Tuscany, they find they are dogged by every conceivable planning disaster, sclerotic bureaucracy, snakes in the grass and murky dealings with their medieval bank. All they want is to transform their 14th-century heap into holiday apartments fit for the 21st century. With no Italian and only a modest budget, their plans hinge on relentless...

According to legend, the Garden of Eden was located in Iraq, and for millennia, Jews resided peacefully in metropolitan Baghdad. Memories of Eden reconstructs the last years of the oldest Jewish Diaspora community in the world through the recollections of Violette Shamash, a Jewish woman who was born in Baghdad in 1912. The result is a deeply textured memoir.