For Stella Fortuna, death has always been a part of life. Stella’s childhood is full of strange, life-threatening incidents—moments where ordinary situations like cooking eggplant or feeding the pigs inexplicably take lethal turns. Even Stella’s own mother is convinced that her daughter is cursed or haunted. In her rugged Italian village, Stella is considered an oddity—beautiful and smart, insolent and cold. Stella uses her peculiar toughness...

When Isabel's niece, Cat, asks Isabel to run her delicatessen while she attends a wedding in Italy, Isabel meets a man with a most interesting problem. He recently had a heart transplant and is suddenly plagued with memories of events that never happened to him. The situation appeals to Isabel as a philosophical question: Is the heart truly the seat of the soul? And it piques her insatiable curiosity: Could the memories be connected with the donor's...

When the massive metal tank filled with sticky brown molasses that rises up over her crowded North End neighborhood explodes, young Carmen must fight for her life, as a tsunami of molasses rushes through the streets.

When archaeologist Angelo Morelli asks Ruth Galloway to come to the Italian countryside to help identify bones found in picturesque Fontana Liri, she jumps at the chance to go―and brings her daughter along for what she assumes will be a working vacation. Upon arriving, Ruth hears murmurs of Fontana Liri’s strong resistance movement during World War II, and begins to sense that the townspeople are harboring an age-old secret. But how, if at all,...

"Matelda, the Cabrelli family’s matriarch, has always been brusque and opinionated. Now, as she faces the end of her life, she is determined to share a long-held secret with her family about her own mother’s great love story: with her childhood friend, Silvio, and with dashing Scottish sea captain John Lawrie McVicars, the father Matelda never knew. . . . In the halcyon past, Domenica Cabrelli thrives in the coastal town of Viareggio until her...

The majestic and haunting beauty of the Italian Alps at the turn of the twentieth century is the setting for the first meeting of Enza and Ciro, who meet as teenagers despite growing up in villages just a few miles apart. But when Ciro catches the local priest in a scandal, he is banished from his village and sent to hide in America as an apprentice to a shoemaker in Little Italy. Without explanation, he leaves a bereft Enza behind. Soon Enza's family...

Edge of forever: "River Glen was at the edge of nowhere1 (Ba tiny, sleepy town nestled on the shores of the Potomac. It was perfect for Dana Brantley, who, after a rocky couple of years, was looking for a peaceful place to start over. But the townspeople had other ideas for the new librarian. They thought she was perfect for their most eligible bachelor, Nick Verone. So did Nick$1 (Bs ten-year-old son, Tony. And so did Nick, himself. He was intrigued...

On the eve of World War I, three Italian immigrants--Julietta, Annamaria, and Luciana--dream of love, but each harbors a secret from their families and from each other that could destroy their hopes of finding happiness.

A breathtaking novel of secrets, lies, and survival in post-World War II Germany, where alliances may not be what they seem. August 1945. As Stefano, an Italian POW, heads toward home across war-ravaged Germany, he encounters a young child beside his dead mother. Unable to leave him to an unknown fate, Stefano takes the boy with him, finding refuge in a seemingly abandoned house in a secluded woodland. But the house is far from vacant. Stefano wakes...

When his niece mysteriously vanishes in New York City, Giancarlo Lo Manto, a Naples police inspector, arranges for a temporary assignment to the NYPD, joining forces with Manhattan veteran Jennifer Fabini to search for the missing girl.