March 2010 Editor's Choice.

Nicky Pellegrino has a knack for transporting you in to the Italian countryside, smelling and tasting the air and the food and feeling the sun on your face. Another lovely tale of relationships, friendships and discovering what life is all about.

April 2010 Good Housekeeping selection.

The Good Housekeeping view...

Recipe For Life  is a slice of sunshine from Nicky Pellegrino. Traumatised chef Alice flees London and heads to the coast of Italy, where she bonds with ageing local Babetta, discovers the joys of Italian food, and finds out what she really wants out of life.

Dear Reader,

I’m writing this on a damp autumn day in London, but thanks to the book you’re looking at now, I feel like I’ve just stepped inside from the Mediterranean sun.

Half the pleasure of reading comes from being transported to a different place or time, and meeting a string of new people there.  And with Recipe for Life, it’s an incredibly welcome journey.

The story of two women, at either ends of their lives, who meet at a crumbling Italian villa tucked into the cliffs above the pounding sea, it’s a novel about what we run from, and the places that make us stop and reconsider. Drenched in sunshine, it’s about friendship and growing up, food and love.

If you’ve read one of Nicky’s novels before, you’ll know her deftness of touch, vivid atmospheric writing and dangerously mouthwatering descriptions of food. They’re all here in abundance. If you’ve not read one before, I hope you’ll love it as much as I do.

So if you’re in need of an escape, you’re invited to a place under a pomegranate tree in southern Italy where secrets spill out and the nights are warm.  All you need to remember is that, like all the best recipes, sometimes the best things happen when you don’t follow the instructions…

Happy reading,

Genevieve Pegg
Senior Commissioning Editor
Orion Fiction

Synopsis

A recipe for life should be a simple thing: love and happiness, family, friends and a little food. But life is rarely straightforward...Alice wants to make the most of life - after all, she knows how fragile it can be - and knows she never feels more alive than when she's cooking. Babetta has spent a lifetime tending the garden of her tiny house on the Italian coast.

Growing food to feed a family now grown and gone. One summer these two women are brought together in a crumbling Mediterranean villa, with the shared language of food and the soil they grow it from. There, under the heat of the Italian sun, or the shade of the pomegranate tree, secrets will be spoken, fears and hopes shared.

But life's lessons are not learnt easily. RECIPE FOR LIFE is a novel about discovering how life never stops surprising us, and about how, with a little love and courage, its flavours can be richer than we ever imagined.

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About the Author

Born in 1964, Nicky Pellegrino is of Italian origin and is married to a New Zealander. She has worked on women's magazines and recently ghost wrote a bestselling autobiography of Angela Dauncy, a well-known New Zealand broadcaster.   More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation