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A young woman tells the story behind two elderly sisters' estrangement, unraveling family secrets stretching back a century and across the Atlantic to early 20th century Italy. 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...
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English
Description
As she turns twelve during the summer of 1953, Penny gains new insights into herself and her family while also learning a secret about her father's death. It's 1953 and 11-year-old Penny dreams of a summer of butter pecan ice cream, swimming, and baseball. But nothing's that easy in Penny's family. For starters, she can't go swimming because her mother's afraid she'll catch polio at the pool. To make matters worse, her favorite uncle is living in...
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A search for an elusive customer leads a young bookseller to research the complicated history of her family in Rome and how it was shaped by mental illness, a communist murder trial, and devastating wartime losses.
Working at a bookstore in Berkeley, Gabriele becomes intrigued by the orders of signor Vietri, a customer from Rome whose numerous purchases grow increasingly mystical and esoteric. She quits her job and, landing in Rome, decides to look...
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English
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"2019: Andie Figuero has just landed her dream job as a producer on Makeover Mansion, a popular reality show about restoring America's most lavish historical houses. Andie's latest project features the once glorious but now crumbling Sprague Hall in Newport ... But the mansion's reclusive owner, Lucia 'Lucky' Sprague, will only allow the show to go forward on two conditions: One, nobody speaks to her. Two, nobody touches the mansion's ruined boathouse....
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English
Description
Batholomeo di Crespi, a bachelor decorator in the upscale New Jersey town of Our Lady of Fatima, circa 1970. His exquisite taste in fabrics and decor have made B well respected in OLOF; he's decorated all the important houses, from his divorced older sister's Georgian manor to Aurelia Mandelbaum's mansion. Aurelia's myopic daughter Capri, still living at home at age 40, has been B's unofficial fiancee for 20 years, but this was their mothers' idea,...
Author
Language
English
Description
It's 1949 and South Philadelphia bursts with opportunity during the post-war boom. The Palazzini Cab Company & Western Union Telegraph Office, owned and operated by Dominic Palazzini and his three sons, is flourishing: business is good, they're surrounded by sympathetic wives and daughters-in-law, with grandchildren on the way. But a decades-long feud that split Dominic and his brother Mike and their once-close families sets the stage for a rematch....
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Language
English
Description
Dominick Birdsey, a 40-year-old housepainter whose subdued life in his hometown of Three Rivers, Connecticut, is disturbed in 1990 when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic whose condition is complicated by religious mania, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation. The story is that of the embattled Birdseys, as recalled in Dominick's elaborated memory-flashbacks.
Author
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English
Appears on list
Description
In 1918 New Orleans, seventeen-year-old Gianna Crutti's worries about her family's grocery, the Great War, and influenza are overshadowed when a murderer returns to terrorize the city--years after he attacked Gianna's parents and left her with a psychic connection between them.
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English
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In 1971, twelve-year-old Lucy Rossi's dad returns from Vietnam after losing part of his arm, and her whole family must learn to adjust to a new dynamic, but Lucy's friend Milo unknowingly helps her navigate through this difficult time of fear and uncertainty to realize she is much tougher than she thought.
Author
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Formats
Description
Beginning in the summer of 1903 the children of Italian immigrants were kidnapped, and dozens of innocent victims were gunned down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators, Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths. The perpetrators' only calling card: the symbol of a black hand. The tabloid press heated ethnic tensions to the boiling point. Joseph Petrosino, a dogged and ingenious detective, and the all-Italian...
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Series
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English
Description
Michael Corleone, youngest son of crime boss Vito Corleone and reigning Don of the Corleone Family, returns from exile in Sicily intending to take over the family organization; however, he must first face his main adversary, Nick Geraci, who worked as a Corleone street enforcer and is every bit as deadly as Michael.
15) An Italian Wife
Author
Language
English
Description
This novel tells the story of Josephine Rimaldi - her joys, sorrows, and passions, spanning more than seven decades. The book begins in turn-of-the-century Italy, when fourteen-year-old Josephine, sheltered and naive, is forced into an arranged marriage to a man she doesn't know or love who is about to depart for America, where she later joins him. Bound by tradition, Josephine gives birth to seven children. The last, Valentina, is conceived in passion,...
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English
Description
In tracing the highly unusual path he traveled to become the New York Times restaurant critic, Frank Bruni tells the captivating story of an unpredictable journalistic odyssey and provides an unflinching account of one person's tumultuous, often painful lifelong struggle with his weight. How does a committed eater embrace food without being undone by it? (Bestseller).
17) Strings attached
Author
Language
English
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Description
When she drops out of school and struggles to start a career on Broadway in the fall of 1950, seventeen-year-old Kit Corrigan accepts help from an old family friend, a lawyer said to have ties with the mob, who then asks her to do some favors for him.
19) Burning midnight
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English
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Description
No one knows where the brilliant-colored spheres came from. One day they were just there, hidden all over the earth like huge gemstones. Burn a pair and they make you a little better: an inch taller, skilled at math, better-looking. The rarer the sphere, the greater the improvement and the more expensive the sphere. Sully is a sphere dealer at a flea market. It doesn't pay much--Alex Holliday's stores have muscled out most of the independent sellers--but...
Author
Series
Revere Beach trilogy volume 1
Language
English
Description
The story of an Italian family in Boston, narrated by its members. The central figure is Peter, a real estate salesman and gambler, in debt to a loan shark who is being investigated by Peter's sister, a journalist. Old country flavor is provided by the father. By the author of Leaving Losapas.
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