The Fire in the Mountain

Helena Atlee’s acutely observed account of the Etna region is refreshingly different. This is travel writing of the quietly classical kind. Attlee tells great stories… It is the food writing, though, that brings you closest to Sicily… It is full of curiosity, personality and, above all, what the wine people call terroir

James McConnachie, Sunday Times

A scholar of all things Italian, and especially Sicilian, with an eye for the quirky and the poetic, Attlee does for Etna what she did for lemons: she delves deep into the history of the volcano and the relationship of its people to their unpredictable land

Caroline Moorhead, The Spectator

Helena Attlee’s The Fire in the Mountain is a richly evocative journey – whether on the rattling circum-Etna railway, on foot through the music-filled streets of Catania at the height of the Saint Agatha festival, at the crater to gaze in awe at the nocturnal pyrotechnics, or in the café, to reward taste buds with iced delicacies once made from the volcano’s winter snows. Atlee makes a compelling case that all of this culture, flavour and spectacle flows – like the lava – from the volcano itself

Clive Oppenheimer

[Attlee has] profound feeling for the terrain … the tireless curiosity she shows in roaming across her mountain is matched by those many graces of style typical of her writing.

Jonathan Keates, Literary Review

Thrillingly sensual, and zesty in every sense, Helena Attlee is the best of companions as she leads us through sundrenched citrus groves and in and out of history

Deborah Moggach, author of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

- - Praise for Helena Attlee

She writes with great lucidity, charm and gentle humour, and wears her considerable learning lightly . . . [with] elegant, absorbing prose and [a] sure-footed ability to combine the academic with the anecdotal

The Times Literary Supplement

Charming and original ... Attlee has the natural storyteller's gift

Stephen Walsh, author of Debussy

Attlee has that rare gift of being able to know an inordinate amount about a subject and yet wear her knowledge so lightly that the tone is anecdotal, not academic. It's a big thing, to pull off such lightness

Yotam Ottolenghi

Attlee has such a wonderful way with words

Daily Mail