Andrew Sean Greer Returns With a Tuscan Comedy That Earns Its Expectations
Andrew Sean Greer won the Pulitzer for Less in 2018 with a novel about a middling novelist tumbling through a series of minor humiliations across several continents. The book worked because its hero was specific, its comedy was warm without being toothless, and Greer trusted the sadness underneath the jokes. Eight years and one sequel later (Less Is Lost, 2022), Greer has a new novel: Villa Coco, published June 9, 2026 by Doubleday. A young American is hired as archivist and assistant to a 92-year-old globe-trotting baronessa named Coco, and they settle into her crumbling Tuscan villa together. The setup reads like Greer writing directly to his own strengths, which is a reason to be genuinely curious and a reason to be slightly wary at the same time.
The wariness is not about quality. Greer is one of the more technically accomplished comic novelists working in English, and the WAMC Book Show interview he gave on June 16, 2026 (around the same week NPR covered the book) showed him in characteristically good form: precise about character, generous about influence, not performing modesty. The wariness is about the frame. A Pulitzer follow-up set in a picturesque Italian villa with an eccentric aristocrat and a young outsider-narrator is, on its face, a premise that could coast. Greer has earned every bit of goodwill in his reader's bank, and Villa Coco could spend it wisely or spend it fast.
What the premise does well is announce a real subject: what it means to serve someone else's memory, to catalog a life that is not your own, while your own life sits uncatalogued. The archivist role is not incidental. Greer used the restless traveler in Less to externalize interiority; here the archivist is a figure for exactly that problem. A 92-year-old baronessa has lived. Her young assistant has not yet. The comedy and the pathos are built into the structure before a single scene is written. The one note worth watching is the setting. Italy in literary fiction is an overworked backdrop, and Greer will need the villa to be a character with specific, inconvenient textures rather than a soft-focus painting of crumbling ochre walls. Based on the premise alone, there is every reason to believe he knows this. Villa Coco is out now.
