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My Italian Bulldozer / Alexander McCall Smith

A food writer is on the rebound after a broken relationship (she ran off with her personal trainer).  A working trip to Montalcino, a hill town in Italy, is the kind of restorative getaway that he needs to put his life and career back on track.  Except the start of the trip seems to go so wrong.  After finding himself in an Italian jail after a rental car agent tries to hoodwink him, and due to an undersupply of available  cars owing to a holiday weekend, he has no other option than to drive a bulldozer from Pisa to his hilltop pension.  It’s  a humorous  prologue which nearly hijacks the entire story, but luckily there’s much more to the novel once the bulldozer is parked in the municipal lot at Montalcino.  As with most McCall Smith’s novels, there’s a lot of talk about life and about nothing, but human relationships are front and center, and by the end of it, Paul has things sorted out satisfactorily.

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