Fashion means everything to Violet Luciano; so does finishing design school. When she lands a summer internship at an up-and-coming fashion brand in Rome, she knows she's got to bring her A game. The interns will be competing against each other: whoever creates the best fashion design will be offered a job at a New York label. Violet is at the top of her class, but she's one of the only students who's approaching thirty. Chasing her dream has left...

Mrs. Stone, a wealthy, fiftyish American widow, is beginning to adjust to the loss of her husband, her retirement from the stage, and the fading of her beauty, when she drifts into an affair with a cruel young gigolo.

An epic spread across three nations, Beyond Babylon casts a probing, endlessly perceptive eye on the lasting effects of traumas both national and personal. Telling the engrossing lives of two half-sisters who meet coincidentally in Tunisia, their mothers, and the elusive father who ties all their stories together, Igiaba Scego's virtuosic novel spreads thickly over Argentina's horrific dirty war, the chaotic final years of Siad Barre's brutal dictatorship...

Gabriel Allon has slipped quietly into Venice for a much needed holiday with his wife and two young children. But when Pope Paul VII dies suddenly, Gabriel is summoned to Rome by the Holy Father's loyal private secretary, Archbishop Luigi Donati. A billion Catholic faithful have been told that the pope died of a heart attack. Donati, however, has two good reasons to suspect his master was murdered. The Swiss Guard who was standing watch outside the...

"Already a bestseller and award-winner in Italy, Lost on Me is a burningly witty coming-of-age novel of a young woman in a wildly eccentric family from one of Italy's most celebrated young writers working today. In this distinctly contemporary, irreverent, and hilariously inverted bildungsroman, award-winning Italian author Veronica Raimo transforms neurosis, sex, and family disaster into brilliant comedy reminiscent of Fleabag and Portnoy's Complaint....

Alice, an art student in New York City, has come to Rome in search of adventure and inspiration before settling down with her steady, safe fiancé. Meg and Alec, busy parents and successful business people from LA, are on a mission to find the holy grail, a certain blue tile that will make their home renovation complete-but soon it becomes clear that their marriage needs a makeover as well. Connie and Lizzie are women of a certain age-"Sometimes I...

"When Anna, now living in California, is contacted by the Italian lover she knew decades before, she recalls their affair and the child she gave up for adoption. As the episode returns to haunt her--threatening the life she's built, including her marriage--the story moves back in time to her youth in Europe. Rome, 1979. Anna, twenty-two and living abroad, is involved with a man already engaged to be married. When she meets and befriends his fiancée,...

"Meet Claire: fifty-two, desperate to do something new and get a fresh start. Enter the chance to go to Rome: Home to a struggling convent facing a precipitous end, the city beckons Claire, who's long had a complicated relationship with religion, including a "missed connection" with convent life in her teens. Once in Rome, she finds a group of funny, fearless nuns in a gorgeous villa, beautiful runs throughout a color-saturated city, and a chance...

"A Little Lumpen Novelita percolates with a young writer's fierce ambitions and intensely tender love of women. "Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime": so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome in A Little Lumpen Novelita. Orphaned overnight as a teenager--"our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us"--she drops out of school, gets a crappy job, sees a terrible brightness...