Businessmen as Lovers

Friends and lovers on a sun-soaked Italian vacation, filled with misanthropic cleverness, operatic drama, and arch silliness

Mimi and Caroline set off to a beautiful Italian island, where they find themselves part of an eccentric cast of expats and vacationers including their debonair host and his mistress, a proud venture capitalist, an Iranian tycoon, and a villainous, slightly tragic local dentist. There is also Mimi’s great love, Beetle, a quiet and unassuming English journalist. As everyone begins to relax and settle into the vacation, drinking and eating away the demands of everyday life, their impish plots culminate in an odd Mediterranean prank involving the poor dentist’s lemon tree.

Back in print after many decades, Businessmen as Lovers is an extraordinarily jubilant and delightful novel by the inimitable Rosemary Tonks: businessmen fall in love, too, but it is with each other.