Why a Booktrail?
2000: On the search for a reclusive writer in Italy
Sex and Genius
What you need to know before your trail
Michael Lear believes that James Hilldyard is the master of the contemporary novel.
So, he travels to the man’s home in Italy and tries to involve him in a TV profile he is looking to produce but is turned down. He is however offered the job of literary secretary instead. This could be exactly the thing to allow him to be part of this genius’ world as well as allowing him to escape his life in London.
But then actress Adela Fairfax comes to town, followed by a pack of Hollywood hounds sniffing at her heels, all trying to buy the film rights on Hilldyard’s as yet unpublished novel. Hilldyard is being hunted and Lear is at the centre of it all
Locations
ResetTravel Guide
The Amalfi Coast
The Circumvesuviana Train
The train moves, “Drawing into daylight under a thicket of power-lines in the direction of Porticini, Torre Annunziata, Castellamare di Stabia, evocative place names denoting a coastline of asphalt and concrete. The sky was overcast, Vesuvius somewhere close, lost behind vapour.”
Capri
On a fine day sea light glimmers on the coastline tower blocks. Capri floats on the horizon like a vast galleon
As the train ran along the southern side of the Bay – under mountains of the Sorrentine peninsula – he realised he was entering Hilldyard’s world, his landscape of retreat.
Hilldyard’s world
He gets off a train in Sorrento and heads up the mountains by bus. This where he meets the writer and where the world of the writer he’s admire for some time opens up before him.
Positano
The small village on the banks of the coast – this is Hilldyard’s world with the ramshackle houses perched on the cliff edge, the rambling winding roads which you will need a stomach of steel to master. But this stunning landscape is where the art canvas of a life lived starts to take shape.
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information: Sex and Genius
Destination: Amalfi Coast, Positano Author/Guide: Conrad Williams Departure Time: 2000s
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