Grove Expectations

Italy Had Other Plans

By: Patricia Farrell

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Andrew Holt never planned to become a lemon farmer. At thirty-two, he was a celebrated furniture designer living his best life in Italy, until an artificial intelligence algorithm decided it could do his job better, faster, and without filing expense reports for wine. Suddenly jobless and ego-bruised, Andrew discovers that his late great-uncle has left him something unexpected in the Amalfi Coast hinterlands: four hundred and thirty-seven lemon trees, a crumbling manor that smells like the inside of a very old shoe, and a crew of eleven Italian workers who are waiting to see what the clueless American does next.

What Andrew does next is spectacular mostly in the ways it goes wrong. He floods the grove, orders the wrong fertilizer, and negotiates a delivery contract using a translation app that turns "price per kilo" into "the price of a small bear." He also meets Nico, the unflappable foreman with forearms like holiday hams, and Cara Donatino, a worker's daughter who shows up twice a week with a basket of homemade lemon products so extraordinary that one taste changes everything.

Funny, warm, and full of the kind of surprises that only happen when you stop planning your life and start actually living it, Grove Expectations is a story about what happens when your worst day turns out to be your best decision. Set against the sunlit beauty of the Italian coast, this novella is perfect for anyone who's ever had to start over from scratch and discovered, along the way, that they were better at it than they thought.