James Hamilton-Paterson is one of those writers who, like James Joyce, chose to forsake his native country for a life of self-imposed exile. Unlike Joyce, however, Hamilton-Paterson has not spent his artistic life writing about the country of his birth, much the opposite in fact. Although he was forty-eight years old when he published his first literary novel, Gerontius (1989), by that time Hamilton-Paterson had been writing for more than twenty years. His nonfiction work reflects his expatriate status, in part because Hamilton-Paterson does not want to remain in England writing for an audience of literary critics but also because it reveals his preference for travel, the sea, and the purity of life in what many would call unrefined surroundings. Today Hamilton-Paterson shuttles between two worlds: a house in the mountains of southern Tuscany, where he lives for about nine months out of the year, and the even more...