Book of the week
Three Gold Coins by Josephine Moon (Allen and Unwin) $33
A visit to the Trevi Fountain, Rome’s symbol of hope and good fortune, begins Australian writer Josephine Moon’s new novel, Three Gold Coins.
Moon, author of such bestsellers as The Chocolate Promise and
The Bee Keeper’s Secrets, follows a tried-and-tested formula where her books are concerned: food, adventure and a strong female lead.
These elements also lie at the heart of Three Gold Coins, which sumptuously journeys readers through rural Italy, the culinary and creative delights of cheese and the protagonist’s relentless quest to unlock dark family secrets – her own and others.
The strong heroine Moon creates this time around is Lara Foxleigh, a Brisbanite. She’s adventurous, empathetic, a gastronome and on her OE.
All of these personality traits are brought out when she falls into an accidental friendship with an equally delightful pensioner, Sam Baker. He’s bitter and debilitated, the perfect foil for Lara’s detective-like determination to get to the bottom of his mysterious past.
There’s also Lara’s brave, complex sibling, Sunny; their irascible mother, Eliza; and Dave, a disturbed family acquaintance. The present difficulties and troubled pasts of this intricate cast of players offset and magnify each other’s strengths and flaws.
If these relationships are astutely nuanced, so too the reader’s immersion in the beauty and ruggedness of the novel’s backdrops, Tuscany and the Domodossola mountains in the North Italian Alps.
Tuscany seems to be the setting du jour, with a number of recent women’s novels set or connected to its lush lands.
Moon’s recreation of Tuscany in Three Gold Coins provides a distinct perspective on a place which could easily have seemed
A feast of characterfocused books set in Italy abounds. Three Gold Coins joins this literary banquet.
so familiar to readers of contemporary women’s fiction it became distracting.
Instead, her details paint the landscape with simplicity and opulence enough to immerse us fully in the action and adventures which occur there.
Meanwhile, the Domodossola Mountains are crafted with lushness for quite different reasons. It’s there that the culinary themes of the novel coalesce, with locals Carlo and Matteo guiding Lara through the intricacies of the cheese-making process. Here, Moon ably ties food to its locality, the perpetual solidity of the ranges entwined to the stamina and vitality of producing ricotta.
With the recent releases of Frances Mayes’ Women in Sunlight, US writer Christina Lynch’s The Italian Party and New Zealand author Nicky Pellegrino’s A Year at Hotel Gondola, a feast of character-focused books set in Italy abounds. Three Gold Coins joins this literary banquet. Like its counterparts, it provides connection to foreign soil, food and formidable characters.
Ultimately, though, it reminds one of its starting point: the iconic Trevi Fountain, for it turns into a beautifully layered story of providence, history and the emotional costs of journeying to unexpected places.
– Siobhan Harvey