A Boatful of Lemons takes place in Positano, the breathtaking cliffside village on Italy's Amalfi Coast. Although the book is a work of fiction it's interlaced with some of Positano's factual local characters, and historic bars and restaurants. And then the other one that we go to quite often is our nearest restaurant to home, the Ritrovo up in Montepertuso, which is a beautiful little restaurant in the little piazza up in the town square. Wendy Holloway: I did look up the Bar Internazionale, which is kind of a classic historic bar. It’s been around forever. Wendy Holloway: About a decade ago I went to a fish shop in Positano and I was watching them load fish coming from the port into the shop, just the most gorgeous fish. And then at a certain point one of the people in the shop loaded up a ton of fish and put it on his shoulder to walk off somewhere. And I said, “Where are you going?” And he said, “Oh, I'm taking this to a restaurant.” I would finish the book when we were only supposed to read the first chapter. So I loved reading and me and my mum together, we always talked about writing a book one day, and it was something that we both loved the idea of doing. We talked about maybe doing it separately or doing it together, but it was a dream that we both had.

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November to March you can fully enjoy the area, tourist-free, although lots of restaurants and shops close for the winter. So... You could read it and come here and find some of the locations, some of the characters even, and really get a feel of what it was like. So, that was my intention. I love books that have crossovers with other characters or books that have places that you can actually look up on Google and find, and they're real. I wanted to make the book a little bit like a treasure hunt in a way for visitors to Positano. I gathered up all the people who were in Positano with me and said, “Come on! We're having lunch where this guy is going.” In fact, lunch at Ristorante Cambusa was amazing. Having been to the Amalfi Coast multiple times over the past few decades, I am always searching for novels set in this colorful seaside setting that I love. This is the first novel that really captures the place AND has great characters and a unique and believable plot.

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I love it now. It's something I do quite happily. And I love the fact that I can make food from what we have in our garden, which is a huge thing for us nowadays. I can remember everybody being so horrified by me and slowly, slowly people teaching me how to feed myself.

A Boatful of Lemons, Positano - Flavor of Italy

You accurately portray life in Positano including local dishes and venues that have been around forever since the time when this book takes place. Wendy Holloway: I think it takes a decade or more before you really feel that the new reality in Positano, or in Rome, or whatever Italian place it is gets into you and becomes more what's “you” than not.It's not often planned, we normally do it quite spontaneously. We only film with my phone, and we really don't have any special equipment. I film the videos, I edit them myself. I love editing. That's my favorite part of everything that I do. I love getting all the bits of video onto my laptop and thinking what am I going to make out of this? What's it going to look like? And putting it all together. I love it. Wendy Holloway: And then for your editing, you airdrop onto your laptop and then next what's your process? So if you're doing it for the money, no, you need to find yourself a publisher who's going to publish it and get it out in the shops and everything.

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They'll often come and sit down at the table with us and they have great food. We go there and they know us well, so we like the fact that we will go there and sit down and they won't even show us the menu, they'll just bring us food. They do these great platters with a bit of everything on them. So I might think to myself, okay, we've got all these vegetables now. I really should go into the kitchen and make something out of them. I look at what I have and say, I can make this and I can make that. So I go to the kitchen, got the phone on a little tripod. And everything takes double the time because you're moving the camera around and trying to film yourself chopping vegetables and cooking. When I got a job in 2001 working in a hotel as the hostess in a restaurant the chef would bit by bit teach me how to make little things like certain pasta sauces and how to cook fish and things like that. Gradually over time I learned from people in shops and people in hotels and people's grandmothers when I went to their houses.

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Then I remembered a book I’d read called Seven Eves. It was science fiction, and I don't normally read science fiction, but it was a fascinating book. It was about how one day the moon broke into pieces, and everybody was like, oh what happened, what happened, and then eventually a scientist comes along and says, we shouldn't be concentrating on what happened, we need to concentrate on what's going to happen next, what are the consequences are of this. Time went on and Maria said, “Okay, it's getting late. Let's go up to the main road that winds through the town and we'll just sit at the bar and we'll wait for Maurizio.” I decided I wanted to write a story based in Positano and I wanted it to be fiction, but I wanted to include a lot of little things that happened to me over the years. I've been living here for 24 years. It's enough time to accumulate a lot of experiences. It takes a good few days to edit and choose the music and add the subtitles and put all the bits together. Sometimes there're bits missing and we have to go and re-film something or sometimes something doesn't make sense.