First published in 1972, Shirley Guiton's account of life on the Venetian island of Torcello begins with her purchase of a dilapidated property and vineyard there, and goes on to describe the many difficulties she encountered in the course of renovating her new home and making the overgrown vineyard productive again. But, with her deepening understanding and experience of the island, the book comes to encompass the whole life of the people who live there, and includes a dramatic account of the disastrous Great Flood which occurred in 1966. This by-now familiar form of narrative was scarcely with precedent when first published. As Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson says, 'This was years before A Year in Provence or Driving Over Lemons reminded readers that they, too, could forsake the grey skies of northern Europe and find the sun - and a collection of locals who would make excellent copy for the books they might write. A publishing industry would blossom ... Shirley was, in a sense, there first.' 'She has even achieved what Mary McCarthy assured all and sundry was impossible - to say something about Venice which previous visitors had not said before ... These pages are touched with Venetian serenity and illuminated by the eccentric lights of the lagoon.' Michael Foot (Evening Standard) 'The most vivid description I've ever read of that fearful 4th of November when Venice was flooded.' John Julius Norwich (BBC Now Read On)

A World by Itself is Shirley Guiton's second book about life in the Venetian Lagoon, following No Magic Eden; but whereas that book was principally concerned with the island of Torcello, where the author had made her home, A World by Itself, takes a broader view, encompassing the northern lagoon islands of Torcello, Burano, Santa Christina and San Francesco del Deserto, and considers how the island communities there would react to the technological upheavals of the twentieth century. As she says, 'Though tradition in the lagoon is strong, the forces of change in this century are stronger.' With its astute depictions of the islands and islanders and its moving concern for the future of their ways of life, A World by Itself, first published in 1977, is as ground-breaking as its predecessor. With this book and No Magic Eden, it may be said that Shirley Guiton has done for the Venetian Lagoon what Ronald Blythe did for Akenfield.