William Wall: Empty Bed Blues

Kate Holohan lives a privileged life. Her university job lecturing in Irish literature and her husband’s financial interests have kept them more than comfortable in recent years, avoiding politics and mostly avoiding each other. When he dies suddenly, the woeful state of his speculative investments is revealed to Kate, as is a mistress and a secret love-nest in the small Italian fishing port of Camogli. Unable and unwilling to deal with her husband’s creditors and deceit, she flees there in the hope of making a new life. Her new neighbour, Anna Alagna, is a formidable and mysterious older lady who takes Kate under her wing, teaching her Italian, finding her work and offering her friendship and more in a world she never dreamed of. But it will be Anna’s past – as a journalist, writer, former Resistance staffetta and a committed communist – that will also challenge Kate and force her to reconsider her responsibilities back home and the values she truly wants to represent.

Over three seasons, William Wall conjures the colours, tastes and smells of Liguria, as Empty Bed Blues explores the intersection of friendship, love, language, politics, debt and capitalism, told with humour, sensitivity and gold standard literary styling.