Miss Garnet's Angel

After the death of her longtime friend and flatmate, retired British history teacher Julia Garnet does something completely out of character: She takes a six-month rental on a modest appartamentoin Venice. An atheist, a Communist, and a virgin, Julia finds herself falling beneath the seductive spell of the city's intoxicating beauty and sensual religiosity. She befriends a young Italian boy and English twins who are restoring a fourteenth-century chapel. And she falls in love for the first time in her life with an art dealer named Carlo. Juxtaposing Julia's journey of self-discovery with the apocryphal tale of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael, Miss Garnet's Angeltells a lyrical, incandescent story of love, loss, miracles, and redemption . . . and of one woman's transformation and epiphany.