This tale of an elderly Englishwoman who goes to Venice, starts drinking brandy and opens up like a flower turned up in lots of Books of the Year selections last year, and it's easy to see why. Salley Vickers has given the sugary-sweet staple a piquant twist by winding it in and around the apocryphal story of Tobias and the Angel; with Venice as a luminous backdrop, she assembles a cast of assorted eccentrics, adds a couple of layers of mystery and a large dose of humanism, and ends up with a charming confection whose taste lingers on the tongue long after the final page has been eagerly, if somewhat wistfully, turned. Several of the premises on which the story hinges - not least the conversion of the eponymous Miss Garnet from "Communist sympathiser" to compulsive churchgoer via Zoroastrianism and the Archangel Raphael - are pretty dodgy propositions, but once hooked, it seems churlish to argue.
