This wonderful book takes the reader into the intimacy of the homes of twenty great international literary figures, from the simple, tropical world of Ernest Hemingway in Key West to the Connecticut Yankee house of Mark Twain in Hartford, from William Faulkner's antebellum mansion in Oxford to the aristocratic Palermo palace of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, or the effete, cluttered rooms of Jean Cocteau's house at Milly-la-Foret outside Paris. All these houses were specially photographed, often for the first time. In the accompanying text, Francesca Premoli-Droulers brilliantly links together the close ties that bind the writers, their books, and their houses.