Marcus of Umbria: What An Italian Dog Taught An American Girl About Love

People magazine calls Marcus of Umbria “charming”; Marley & Me author John Grogan proclaims that Justine van der Leun “is blessed with the elusive gift of storytelling”; Like Water for Elephants author Sara Gruen calls the book “warm, comic, and beautifully descriptive. I devoured this compassionate and sharply funny book in one sitting.”_x000D_
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Readers will delight in this tale of an urbanite who leaves her magazine job to move to Collelungo,_x000D_
Italy, population: 200. There, in the ancient city center of a historic Umbrian village, she sets up house_x000D_
with the enticing local gardener she met on vacation only weeks earlier. This impulsive decision launches an eye-opening series of misadventures when village life and romance turn out to be radically different from what she had imagined._x000D_
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Love lost with the gardener is found instead with Marcus, an abandoned English pointer that she_x000D_
rescues. With Marcus by her side, Justine discovers the bliss and hardship of living in the countryside:_x000D_
herding sheep, tending to wild horses, picking olives with her adopted Italian family, and trying her best to learn the regional dialect. The result is a rich, comic, and unconventional portrait about learning to live and love in the most unexpected ways.