In her debut collection, Megan K. Williams, a Rome-based writer and correspondent, serves up the Eternal City as you've never seen it before, turning an insider's eye on the love, mystery and unholy chaos of Rome.

In nine funny and insightful stories, Williams delves into the lives of women searching for meaning (and survival) in an ancient metropolis awhirl in honking Fiats, smouldering cigarettes and teetering high heels. Piercing, quirky, hilarious and heartbreaking, Saving Rome's women are trapped in a new-millennium Roman circus sideshow. One follows her husband to Italy only to become obsessed with an eccentric pet-shop owner. Another, a rattled mother, gives a carabiniere officer the finger over a parking dispute, and is horrified when he trails her home. Not to mention the jilted innamorata who pushes her tour-guide host to the thin edge of sanity.

As these ex-pats' illusions of Italian life unravel, so do their ideas about themselves and those closest to them. And as they struggle to bridge the gap between home and Rome, between the familiar and the inexplicable, they do so with awkward, imperfect and profoundly touching grace.