(orion, $39.99)
Real life is all very well and, of course, completely unavoidable, but sometimes you need to escape it. If going to Italy to lie on the beach and nibble at antipasto platters with your girlfriends isn’t an option, I can heartily suggest taking a bottle of red and a copy of The Villa Girls to a closer corner and losing yourself in its pages.
Rosie is a fragile English schoolgirl suffering from the untimely death of both parents when she is swept up by the rambunctious Martinelli family, courtesy of her school friend Addolorata.
It is Addolorata who drags Rosie away on the first Villa Girls trip to the summer sun, and who introduces her to the delights of her father Beppi’s cooking, which sparks a passion Rosie will eventually turn into a career as a food stylist.
But firm tubes of rigatoni blanketed in homemade pesto and ricotta tarts topped with brandied cherries aren’t the only Italian delights to take lonely Rosie’s fancy.
on a Villa Girls trip to the charming Calabrian town of Triento, she meets handsome Enzo, the sensitive heir toan olive oil fortune, who is also a trifle at odds with the world.
How these two work out if it’s love they want and how to get it forms the heart of this page-turner, which makes it quite a romantic outing for the Weekly’s very own Nicky Pellegrino.
The Villa Girls is her fifth novel and she says even though the last four weren’t romances, they are always categorised as such, so she decided to take the line of least resistance and deliberately write one. However, with its equal focus on the four girls who lean on each other over the years through, literally, thick and thin, it’sreally a story about friendship.
Nicky folds in a few delicious ingredients from her earlier novels, revisiting Triento, which features in The Gypsy Tea Rooms, and The Italian Wedding’s fiery Martinelli family, so that ultimately, reading this book is itself like escaping for a holiday with dear old friends.