WRITER and Italian garden expert Helena Attlee will talk about her fascinating new book, The Land Where Lemons Grow, which has been BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and a Sunday Times bestseller since its publication earlier this year.

Travellers have always been thrilled by the sight of citrus in Italy, where dark leaves and bright fruit seem to charge the landscape, making the trees symbols of a sun-soaked, poetic vision of the country. Citrus also holds a special place in the Italian imagination, and, in The Land Where Lemons Grow, Helena Attlee sets out to explore its curious past and its enduring resonance in Italian culture.

She undertakes a journey encompassing the sticky streets of Ivrea during the Battle of Oranges, the peaceful gardens of Tuscany's villas and a magic triangle of land in Sicily, where the best blood oranges in the world grow in the shadow of a volcano. She maps the citron's long migration from the foothills of the Himalayas to the shores of southern Italy, traces the bitter juice of Seville oranges through ancient Roman and Renaissance cookery books, exposes early manifestations of the Mafia during the nineteenth-century citrus boom, and laments the loss of landscapes shaped by citrus cultivation.

Tickets for the talk on Tuesday, June 17, at 7pm are available from Rossiter Books in Ross 01989 564464 or Monmouth 01600 775572 and online from rossiterbooks.co.uk.