Literary Fiction Italy

Marvellously atmospheric tale of strangers summoned to a grand but neglected villa on the Italian coast. Each of them has been named in a will, but nobody knows their benefactress.... Four very different people are named in a will. Delia, an opera singer robbed of her voice by illness; George, an idealistic scientist who cannot face what his skills have created; Marjorie, desperately poor and unable to dislodge her writer’s block; and Lucius, ostensibly in control but whose personal life is in chaos.

After what seems like several lifetimes as a policeman, Commissario Trotti can't wait to retire to the villa he jointly owns with his cousin, where his biggest concern will be keeping track of his chickens. But things keep getting in the way of his plans. Like Fabrizio Bassi, for instance.

The story of a young and affluent middle-class girl, Lucy Honeychurch is wooed by George Emerson and Cecil Vyse whilst vacationing in Italy. Though attracted to George, Lucy becomes engaged to Cecil despite twice turning down his proposals. On hearing of the news, George confesses his love, leaving Lucy torn between marrying the more socially acceptable Cecil, or George, the man she knows would bring her true happiness.

This is a journey of both escape and discovery for four exquisitely different women, a month of bliss and privacy for four weary souls. Their refuge on the Italian Riviera provides the perfect backdrop for a story about the search for spiritual harmony within and without.

Set in Venice at the close of World War II, Across the River and into the Trees is the bittersweet story of a middle-aged American colonel, scarred by war and in failing health, who finds love with a young Italian countess at the very moment when his life is becoming a physical hardship to him.

Set in a sun-drenched Sicily, among the decadent Italian aristocracy of the late 1950s, Steven Price’s Lampedusa explores the final years of Giuseppe Tomasi, last prince of Lampedusa, as he struggles to complete his only novel, The Leopard. In 1955, Giuseppe Tomasi was diagnosed with advanced emphysema; shortly after, he began work on a novel that would fail to be published before his death four years later. When The Leopard at last appeared, it won Italy’s Strega Prize and became the greatest Italian novel of the century.

A "wild west" tale of two brothers who battle both the state and a mafia empire in 1920s Italy, from famed Italian author Andrea Camilleri. Raffadali, province of Agrigento, 1920s. The Sacco brothers are free men with strong ideas about socialism and the state. Their lives change radically one morning when their father, Luigi Sacco, receives an anonymous letter from the local Mafia demanding protection money and is the victim of a robbery attempt. Luigi tells the police of the extortion letters he received, but the police don't know what to do.

Under-appreciated until now, The Lost Girl is perhaps D.H. Lawrence's most beautiful, thoroughly contemporary, love story. This captivating novel charts the journey of a woman caught between two worlds and two lives, one mired in dreary, industrial England and a life of convention, the other set in the vibrant Italian landscape holding the promise of sensual liberation.

Set in Italy and England, this is a rich and romantic story of Lucy Honeychurch and the choice she must make between love and convention.

Set against the glorious backdrops of Rome, Florence, and Genoa, and Naples, peopled with historical characters and filled with the details of the life of a 17th-century painter, The Passion of Artemisia is the story of Gentileschi's struggle to find love, forgiveness, and wholeness through her art.

Connie Granger has escaped the devastation of her bombed out city home. She has found work in the Women's Timber Corps, and for her, this remote community must now serve a secret purpose. Seppe, an Italian prisoner of war, is haunted by his memories. But in the forest camp, he finds a strange kind of freedom. In each other they find the means to imagine their own lives anew, and to face that which each fears the most. But outside their haven, the world is ravaged by war and old certainties are crumbling.

It is September 8, 1943, and 14-year-old Claudette Blum and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to find safety now that the Italians have broken from Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it quickly becomes an open battleground for the Nazis, the Allies, Resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive.

Twilight in Italy describes Lawrence’s time as an educated working-class Englishman living among the Italian working men and women in the region around Lake Garda, from the Austrian Alps to the North, to Switzerland and finally Como and Milan. He captures the psyche of Italian peasants without ever romanticising or patronising them.

The author of the best seller Call Me by Your Name revisits its beguiling characters decades after their first meeting. In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever. Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic.

Newly married, Scottie and Michael are seduced by Tuscany's famous beauty. But the secrets they are keeping from each other force them beneath the splendid surface to a more complex view of ltaly, America, and each other. When Scottie’s Italian teacher - a teenager with secrets of his own - disappears, her search for him leads her to discover other, darker truths about herself, her husband, and her country. Michael’s dedication to saving the world from communism crumbles as he begins to see that he is a pawn in a much different game.

It is September 8, 1943, and 14-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful.

It was strange because it wasn't so long ago that he was convinced the only way out of the depression that had crippled him since he was a child was death. But now, he is on a high-speed train, travelling from Rome to Modena, a failed novelist on the tail of a famous physicist whose memoir he is ghostwriting. The more of another man's life he writes, the more his debt to his publisher is paid off. But nothing would be possible had he not experienced the life-altering, life-saving treatment for the darkness which had been hovering since the chemical spill in West Virginia.

In old Bari, everyone knows Maria De Santis as “Malacarne,” the bad seed. Nicknamed for her dark features, volcanic temperament, and resistance to rules, the headstrong girl can only imagine the possibilities that lie outside her poverty-stricken neighborhood. Growing up with her mother, two brothers, and a tyrannical father, Maria must abide. She does - amid the squalid life to which she was born, the cruelties of her small-minded neighbors, and violence in a constant threat of eruption. 

Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second World War, these interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters. The Novel of Ferrara memorializes not only the Ferrarese people, but the city itself, which assumes a character and a voice deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs. 

The year is 1943. Nazis have invaded Italy; American troops have landed. At Aldo's restaurant on the Adriatic coast, Lucia Fantini, wife of the late Aldo, entertained customers for years with her marvelous opera singing, but normal operations have ceased.