As someone who has lived in modern Italy I have little patience for those who paint it with a broad romantic brush. It was therefore refreshing to find a description of Venice through the eyes of a newcomer that recognised its beauty while managing to bring forth the mundane detail that makes it a real place for the reader to experience.

The story is told through the point of view of Adam Woods, a young graduate who moves to Venice to start afresh after a painful split from his girlfriend. The book is presented in the narrative as having been written by Adam, but with the foreword that warns us that this is not the book he meant to write when he came to Venice.

Gordon Crace is a former writer who after publishing a hugely successful novel fled from public life into a Venetian palazzo which he never leaves under any circumstance. He needs an assistant to help run his household and when Adam’s job as an English tutor falls through, someone points him in Crace’s direction.

The arrangement is simple: Adam is to put up with Crace’s eccentricities – which include restricting Adam’s movements so that he can’t leave the house for longer than a few minutes – and Adam has a quiet place in which to try and realise his ambition to write a novel.

As his relationship with Crace develops, however, Adam comes to realise that Crace’s history would make a far better book than anything he had in mind to write. The only problem is the author’s revulsion to the idea of allowing his biography to be written or even to discuss anything related to his writing career or the past in general.

This of course has the effect of provoking Adam’s curiosity, and he embarks on a string of lies and deceit that will take him back to England in search of Crace’s closet skeletons.

Going back, however, means facing his own demons, and it is only at that point that the reader starts to realise how dark Adam’s own past is. This is a masterful stroke by Andrew Wilson, as it is easy to take the narrator’s virtue for granted in a book, and the reader therefore tends to focus mainly on Gordon Crace’s dark side, and the fact that all is not as it would seem with our young hero comes as a bit of a shock.

The situation escalates tremendously, and things come to a head back in Venice, where all is revealed… with a twist of course.

This is an entertaining page turner which manages to balance gritty realism with romantic and atmospheric touches in just the right amounts to grip the reader. A confident fictional first effort from a seasoned writer, which promises a bright future in that direction.