Italian Family Fiction

When Katy’s mother dies, she is left reeling. Carol wasn’t just Katy’s mom, but her best friend and first phone call. She had all the answers and now, when Katy needs her the most, she is gone. To make matters worse, their planned mother-daughter trip of a lifetime looms: to Positano, the magical town where Carol spent the summer right before she met Katy’s father. Katy has been waiting years for Carol to take her, and now she is faced with embarking on the adventure alone.

A writer who's blocked - I'm a total cliche. Lucky for me, my agent has a cure that's an even bigger stereotype - a month at her villa in Tuscany, with nothing to do but find my muse. When he walks right in the front door, adorable son in tow, it feels like fate has finally done for me what it does for every other cliched girl I've seen in the movies. Except that he's completely off-limits. In this case, business and pleasure can never mix. Because Claudio is my agent's ex.

When Elizabeth drops her beloved only daughter off at college, she holds back the tears…fighting her worries about an empty nest with the thought of all the adventures that she and her husband Joel can now enjoy together. But as soon as they sit down to eat dinner that evening, Joel drops a bombshell. He wants a break. Searching for an escape, Elizabeth discovers an apartment in Rome that is only available for three months rental to ‘an English woman of a certain age’.

Workaholic, career-obsessed Francesca is fiercely independent and successful in all areas of life except one: family. She struggles to make time for her relationship with her teenage daughter, Allegra, and the two have become practically strangers to each other. When Allegra hangs out with a new crowd and is arrested for drug possession, Francesca gives in to her mother's wish that they take one epic summer vacation to trace their family roots in Italy. What she never expected was to be faced with the choice of a lifetime....

I’ve always gotten what I wanted—by force if necessary. Five years ago, I took Valentina’s virginity and left her behind, never looking back. She was just a means to an end, or so I thought. Now, our families are forcing us into an arranged marriage, and I’ll finally make her mine. But Valentina’s hiding more than just her defiance. There’s a secret she’s kept—a child I never knew existed. When I find out she’s pregnant again, my world shifts. For the first time, I want something more than power. I want her and the family she’s kept from me, and I’ll do whatever it ...

It is 1950 in glittering, vibrant New York City. Lucia Sartori is the beautiful twenty-five-year-old daughter of a prosperous Italian grocer in Greenwich Village. The postwar boom is ripe with opportunities for talented girls with ambition, and Lucia becomes an apprentice to an up-and-coming designer at chic B. Altman’s department store on Fifth Avenue.

Seventy-five-year-old Ronnie has made it her mission to help women of a certain age rediscover themselves. The owner of a palazzo in Rome, she has left her troubled past behind and reinvented herself in the most beautiful city in the world. And now she helps other women to do the same. Renting out her spare apartment for three months at a time, Ronnie invites her guests to take on a series of challenges that will help them to embrace beauty and joy, to rediscover themselves and to live their lives to the fullest. But Ronnie’s confident exterior hides heartbreak and closely held secrets.

Giovanna’s pretty face is changing, turning ugly, at least so her father thinks. Giovanna, he says, is looking more like her Aunt Vittoria every day. But can it be true? Is she really changing? Will she turn out like her despised Aunt Vittoria, a woman she hardly knows but whom her mother and father have spent their whole lives avoiding and deriding? There must be a mirror somewhere in which she can see herself as she truly is.

Pieta Martinelli's sister is getting married. Since she is a bridal designer it falls to her to make the wedding gown. But Pieta is distracted by a series of unanswered questions. Why is her father feuding with another Italian in the neighbourhood? Why is her mother so faded and sad? And could the man she's always held a torch for really be getting married to someone else? As Pieta stitches and beads her sister's wedding gown she uncovers the secrets that have made her family what it is and that stand between her and happiness.

Stella has life under control - and that's the way she likes it. For 25 years, she's been the trusted assistant to a legendary fashion designer, but after her boss dies suddenly, she's left with nothing to do apart from clear the studio. It seems as though the life she wanted has vanished. She is lost - until one day she finds a house swap website and sees a beautiful old villa in a Southern Italian village. Could she really exchange her poky London flat for that?

Si possono abbandonare il proprio padre e la propria madre? Si può sbattere la porta, scendere le scale e decidere che non li si vedrà più? Mettere in discussione l’origine, sfuggire alla sua stretta? Dopo dieci anni sottratti al logoramento di una violenza sottile e pervasiva tra le mura di casa, finalmente un figlio può voltarsi e narrare la sua disgraziata famiglia e il tabù di questa censura “con la forza brutale del romanzo”.

Lively widow Varina Paladino has lived in the same house in Wyldale, New Jersey, her entire life. The town might be slightly stuck in the 1960s, when small businesses thrived and most residents were Italian, but its population is getting younger and the Paladinos are embracing the change. What Varina’s not embracing, much to her ninety-two-year-old mother’s dismay, is dating. Running Paladino’s Italian Specialties grocery, caring for her mother, and keeping her large, loud Jersey Italian family from killing one another takes up all of Varina’s energy anyway.

WW II has ended, yet the extreme woes of wounded and mentally traumatized soldiers abound throughout the world. Teramo, Italy 1945Forty-two year old Sarah Puglia had been forced to remain in England during the horrors of WW II with her British family the Bentley's; due to it being extremely unsafe for a British subject to venture back into Italy which is where she calls home with Lorenzo her Italian husband. During the six excruciatingly long years apart, Sarah's husband had been conscripted to be a foot soldier against his will to fight for the Italian Army. In the final year of the war, ...

My family’s empire is crumbling as the feds close in. And the woman I can’t let go of might be our greatest betrayal. I'm caught in a web of lies and betrayal. Every move I make could be my last. Trust is a luxury I can't afford. But the truth? The truth might destroy us all. There's a rat in our family. The feds are closing in. And a secret that could change everything. I have to choose: Loyalty to my blood, Or a chance at redemption. The clock is ticking. The stakes have never been higher. And I'm running out of time. Who will survive when the dust settles? Only one way to find out.

Teramo Italy 1993 For generations, the Puglia family's sun-drenched vineyard in the heart of Italy has stood as a testament to passion, tradition, and unbreakable family bonds. However, when the family patriarch, Lorenzo, passes away, the legacy he leaves behind becomes a battleground. At the heart of the story is Nonna Sarah, a British-born woman and Lorenzo's widow. Now in her nineties, she remains full of grit and grace, determined to keep her husband's dream alive. But with her only son Leonardo, an acclaimed landscape painter who wants nothing to do with the wine business and refuses ...

Italy, 1943. The seeds of terror planted by Hitler have brought Allied forces to Italian soil. Young lovers separated by war—one near a Tuscan hill town, the other a soldier on the Sicilian front—will meet any challenge to reunite.

*** 2023 Chaucer Book Awards Finalist*** 1365, Venice, Italy. For generations, the merchants of House Aretoli have profited through faithful service to the Republic of Venice. Despite being only a minor senatorial family, they’ve established a reputation for reliability, fidelity, and ingenuity. But the Aretoli are about to face the ultimate test. Caught up in a rebellion on Venice’s territory of Crete, young Niccolo Aretoli returns as a hero after saving the governor’s life and evacuating the loyal citizenry. Yet despite his new fame, not all is well in Venice. Niccolo’s beloved ...

In the late 1800s, the residents of a small village in coastal Italy migrated to the promised land of America. They eventually settled in Roseto, Pennsylvania, where they re-created every detail of their former lives, including the centerpiece of Roseto’s colorful old-world tradition: the annual pageant for Our Lady of Mount Caramel—or “the Big Time,” as it’s called by the young women competing to be its Queen.

The rich atmosphere of South Carolina, both Hilton Head and Charleston, is brought vividly to life by Dorothea Benton Frank, a South Carolina native who, with her exquisitely evocative prose, makes you smell the sea air, see the palmettos, and savor the sweet tea, but this time it comes with a side of antipasti.

Sevastiano Cantarelli can barely believe Amy Taylor is real. After the lifetime of betrayal he’s experienced, her surprising sweetness is the ultimate threat to his cynical worldview! Unwrapping her innocence was a gift he couldn’t forget...but one he knows it wouldn’t be fair to repeat. Their encounter left Amy exhilarated - and wanted for the first time. She knows that walking away from the commanding Italian is the safest way to keep her heart intact. Yet it’s the one thing she can’t do...because she’s pregnant with Sevastiano’s twins!