The small Tuscan town of Castelluccio is preparing for its annual festival, a spectacular pageant in which a leading role will be taken by the self-exiled English painter Gideon Westfall. A man proudly out of step with modernity, Westfall is regarded by some as a maestro, but in Castelluccio
- as in the wider art world
- he has his enemies, & his niece
- just arrived from England
- is no great admirer either. & a local girl is missing, a disappearance that seems to implicate the artist. But the life & art of Gideon Westfall form just one strand of Nostalgia, a novel that teems with incidents & characters, from religious visionaries to folk heroes. Constantly shifting between the panoramic & the intimate, between the past & the present, Nostalgia is a fiction into which are woven the kaleidoscopic narratives of art, architecture, history, legend & much more.