THE SECRET PAPERS OF MADAME OLIVETTI

52-year-old Lily Crisp has traveled from Idaho to a coastal village in southern France in order to reassess her life. Her cattle-ranching husband of 26 years died suddenly two years before, and Lily, still processing that loss and complications from a love affair she had ten years earlier, takes up residence in the French farmhouse that has been in her husband’s family for generations. To make sense of both past and present, she turns to her old portable typewriter, Madame Olivetti, with whom she shares her secrets, pounding out on creaky keys a story about love and loss, courage and betrayal, missteps and forgiveness, physical passion and intoxicating love affairs. Yves Lebrun, the strapping handyman whom Lily hires to fix some broken tiles, repairs more than her roof. But it is Madame Olivetti, faithfully recording memories, who draws us back into Lily’s past and turns over the intriguing page of her future. Vanderbilt, writing with assured style and an unassuming gift for storytelling, offers readers an engrossing journey through the complexities of love, death, and new beginnings.