ROME– Elizabeth Macdonald’s electrifying read, A House of Cards, captures what many attempted before, the myriad contradictions that render Italy irresistible but infuriating to foreigners.

  A collection of short stories, each more troubling than the last, with A House of Cards Ms Macdonald takes Tuscany as her backdrop and portrays a handful of haunting scenes across its cobbled streets, the beauty and complexity of her landscapes breaking through the touristy surface.

 Ms Macdonald utilises the brevity inherent in the short story format to inject immediacy and tension into every moment. Through each story in turn, single days in her character’s lives provide a pivotal moment in which reality crashes through the dolce vità dream.

 Macdonald exposes the frailty of human tranquillity through chance encounters, or seemingly ordinary events, which ultimately disturb the balance of her protagonists’ lives. A family meal with the Italian in-laws, a classical music concert in a Tuscan villa, a festival of lights on the banks of the Arno, each vivid setting makes a claim on the reader’s imagination.

  And yet, the beauty is underscored with a darker edge: infidelity, familial bickering, ignorance. Macdonald’s real strength as a writer comes through her expert handling of the light and the dark. The drama in her text does not feel to be artificially wedged in in order to create conflict, but rather a natural and inevitable partner to the passion of the Italian culture.

  The majority of our protagonists are, like the author herself, Irish or 'Anglo Saxon' nationals living in Italy. Time and again, Macdonald beautifully conveys the problems of identity which come from feeling foreign, of drifting in a no-man’s-land between cultures. Her characters are outsiders, and from this position, they make disquieting observations of their adopted country, which may well draw a nod of recognition from readers familiar with the peninsula, and intrigue those who aren’t.

  While Macdonald’s short stories are masterfully written, at times the book feels as though it is straining at the seams of its own format. It will not be at all surprising if Macdonald’s Tuscany is once again in print one day soon, but in the confines of a novel which would allow an even richer and more darkly complex portrayal.

  In A House of Cards, the flitting between narrators leaves the true star, and the most lasting impression, to be of the landscape it is set in, rather than the characters who inhabit it. We are offered mere snapshots of lives, which collectively offer an impressive and unsettling rumination on the intensity of Italy as a home. This is expat fiction as you have never read it before, and like the country it is set in, is equal parts intoxicating and terrifying.

 A House of Cards by Elizabeth Macdonald is published by Portia Publishing, 166 pages, RRP £8.00,