Andrew Sean Greer, the Pulitzer Prize winner whose novel Less became an international phenomenon, has returned with Villa Coco, a screwball comedy that trades transatlantic melancholy for the sun-drenched absurdity of the Tuscan hills.
Published in June 2026, the novel follows a 21-year-old American college graduate who arrives in the fictional village of San Drogo to catalog the crumbling estate of a baronessa. He soon becomes the all-purpose assistant to the woman known to friends as Coco, a defiantly youthful and flamboyant ninety-two-year-old whose appetite for life dwarfs his own.
A bildungsroman in the 1990s
Set in the last decade before the smartphone, Villa Coco is a coming-of-age story about a young man still deciding who he wants to be. Greer uses the villa and its aging chatelaine as a comic engine, throwing his naive narrator into a Mediterranean world of eccentric locals, buried family secrets and gloriously undignified misadventures.
Familiar Greer warmth
Critics anticipating the book have pointed to the same wit, charm and humanity that made Less resonate. Ron Charles, previewing it as "Under the Tuscan Fun," flagged the novel's bawdy energy and its affectionate mockery of how seriously the young take themselves.
- Setting: the fictional Italian village of San Drogo in the 1990s
- Premise: a lost graduate catalogs a baronessa's estate
- Coco: a 92-year-old force of nature at the heart of the book
- Mode: screwball comedy and coming-of-age tale combined
Life after Less
Greer's challenge has always been following a book as beloved as Less, whose hapless novelist Arthur Less charmed readers worldwide. Rather than repeat that formula, Villa Coco leans into pure comic exuberance, described by its publisher as a bawdy ballad about becoming who we always wanted to be.
An ode to living out loud
At its core, the novel is a meditation on vitality, embodied by a nonagenarian who refuses to shrink. The contrast between Coco's late-life boldness and the narrator's youthful uncertainty gives the comedy its emotional spine, suggesting that wisdom sometimes flows upward, from the old to the young.
For readers craving a warm, funny summer novel with genuine feeling beneath the farce, Greer offers a generous invitation. Villa Coco arrives as one of the most purely enjoyable literary releases of the season, proof that the author of Less can still find fresh comedy in the human urge to reinvent ourselves.
Comic fiction with staying power
Greer belongs to a small group of contemporary novelists who treat comedy as a serious literary mode rather than a lightweight diversion. Like his celebrated predecessors in the tradition of the sunny European farce, he uses laughter to sneak past the reader's defenses before landing an emotional blow. Villa Coco balances slapstick with genuine reflection on aging, ambition and the fear of squandering one's youth. That balance is difficult to strike, and it is why Greer's admirers have waited eagerly for this book. The verdict from early readers suggests he has pulled it off again, delivering the rare comic novel that leaves a lasting ache beneath the smile.