This book is not just a story - it's a brutally honest, sometimes hilarious, and often maddening account of everything going wrong, a legal system stuck in the Dark Ages, and the ways women are abandoned, mistreated and left to fend for themselves. Through the madness, there's humour, because without it, I would have gone insane.

It is about a country that seemed to be determined to break me to the absurdity of everyday life here - this is the real Italy. Not one of the tourist brochures, but the one I found myself married to, for better or (mostly) worse, a crash course in inefficiency, and a front row seat to the darker realities of Italian culture.