Also of interest…in tales of old and new Italy

Queen Bee of Tuscany

by Ben Downing (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)

What “a great, sunny garden-party of a book,” said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. Ostensibly a biography of Janet Ross, a well-born Englishwoman who long served as the grande dame of a flourishing expatriate community in Florence, it ushers readers into Ross’s heady world and brims with anecdotes about the likes of Twain, Thackeray, and Tennyson. Ben Downing writes prose of “enviable suavity”; his first work of nonfiction is “quite simply one of the best books of the year.”

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The Light in the Ruins

by Chris Bohjalian (Doubleday, $26)

“This story is a doozy,” said Amanda St. Amand in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Chris Bohjalian’s 16th novel and first mystery opens with the murder of a young woman in 1955 Florence, then cuts “seamlessly” back and forth in time to show how World War II divided her noble family in ways that unleashed the serial killer who tore out her heart. “Not every author” could mix together such potboiler ingredients. But Bohjalian hits “only a few false notes” from the first page to the last.

Italian Ways

by Tim Parks (Norton, $26)

It seems unlikely that a country’s entire culture could be understood by studying its trains, said Marjorie Kehe in CSMonitor.com. But author Tim Parks, an Englishman who’s been living in and writing about Italy for decades, here pulls readers into a passenger car and creates a fresh portrait of a nation that proves both dependably frustrating and “endlessly fascinating.” For every moment that Parks becomes annoyed by Italy as he tours it by rail, “there are at least two in which it delights him.”

Blood & Beauty

by Sarah Dunant (Random House, $27)

The Borgias couldn’t ask for a better publicist, said Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times. Sarah Dunant’s latest historical novel casts a family insider as narrator, and her compelling voice turns her famously conniving kinsmen into “fully rounded characters, brimming with life and lust.” When Rodrigo Borgia schemes his way to the papacy in 1492 and his teenage mistress rejoices, you might not empathize with either character, but you finally see their behavior in the context of a brutal time.