There are many things that might happen when a woman is experiencing a long dark night of the soul: being whisked off to sunny Tuscany is rarely one of them. If only it was, Janine Burke suggests in her award-winning second novel.

First published in 1986, Second Sight came out years before Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, another book that extolls Italy’s revitalising properties, though in a very different way. It won the Vance Palmer Award for Fiction in 1987.