On the Spine of Italy: A Year in the Abruzzi by Harry Clifton (Pan £6.99 UK)

Harry Clifton will be known to many as a poet, and his first book of prose bears the traces of the poet's eye for detail. Clifton and his wife, the novelist Deirdre Madden, spent a year living in a slowly collapsing fridge of a house, attached like a dying barnacle to the back of the village church. The book recounts the pattern of their days in the mountain village of central Italy, where they were both writing books and living unobtrusively among the local people. Let's face it, you're never completely unobtrusive anywhere outside your own place. This book has nothing of the smug excess of other such ex-pat accounts, but although Clifton records his temporary neighbours with a non-judgemental eye, I would have liked to be that fly on the wall when his

book reached the village bar and shop. Basics count in a mountain village most vehicles can't get to in winter. The ongoing hunt for fuel in an icy winter could double as a classic quest tale, and Clifton's description of being cold in a cold house is so vivid you'll start shivering yourself.