After Hannibal - Tapa dura

A group of very different people--including a retired American couple, a feuding British family, two gay lovers, and a manipulative lawyer--is brought together and overwhelmed by local chicanery and the byzantine circuitry of Italian life. 35,000 first printing. $35,000 ad/promo.

th, the Booker Prize-winning author of Sacred Hunger and the bestselling Morality Play, returns in top form with this worldly, bittersweet comedy of manners and morals set in one of Italy's most glorious--and historically treacherous--regions.

Golden Umbria is home to breathtaking scenery and great art; it is also where Hannibal and his invading band of Carthaginians ambushed and slaughtered a Roman legion, and where the local place-names still speak of that bloodshed.

Unsworth's contemporary invaders include the Greens, a retired American couple seeking serenity among the Umbrian hills, who are bilked out of their savings by the corrupt English "building expert" Stan Blemish; the Chapmans, a British property speculator and his wife, whose dispute with their neighbors over a wall escalates into a feud of nearly medieval proportions; Anders Ritter, a German haunted by the part his father played in a mass killing of Italian hostages in Rome d