When Grace books a six-week research trip to Sicily, she expects to spend her time focusing on Italian dialects while waiting for her long-term partner, Jack, to join her. Instead, renting a room in Nico’s apartment leads her down an unexpected path as their friendship slowly deepens into something more intimate just as Jack’s arrival approaches.

Through Nico, Grace is immersed in the local life, and falls more in love with her new, brief lifestyle and the possibilities that could blossom from it. The longing that grows quietly between them is more raw and palpable than anything she feels for Jack, and so I was extremely surprised when this did not turn out to be the type of book I was expecting. This setup initially seems familiar – a woman in an unfulfilling relationship swept up in a romantic holiday fantasy – but Abbey Lay subverts expectations. Slip feels strikingly authentic, like a genuine human experience rather than an escapist fantasy. It is intoxicating in its sensory detail of Italian food, scenery, language, and culture. It is humorously realistic about Grace’s distractions from studying, instead indulging in dolce far niente as she cooks at home, swims at the beach, explores restaurants, galleries and nearby islands. But it is simultaneously bittersweet and sobering in how realistically the events do turn out, drawing a line between the fantasies that are perhaps too bold or scary for us to make real, and the reality that is safe and comfortable.

Slip is a love letter to the tourist experience of slipping into a new, exciting adventure before returning to the mundanities of life back home. But, more poignantly, it is a love letter to what could have been – the haunting ‘what if’ that plagues you, the imagining of a different future in a different place, or with a different person.