A love of food and the warmth of Italy shine out of this story.  Told in alternating chapters between a young, hurt and lost English girl and an Italian mama, this involving family drama is a joy.  Full of incident and great characters, it is a lovely read. You will also enjoy Summer at the Villa Rosa by the  same author.

Comparison: Adriana Trigiani, Joanne Harris, Christobel Kent.

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

Comparison: Christobel Kent, Santa Montefiore, Joanne Harris
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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, supplying 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. 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.

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About the Author

When Nicky Pellegrino's Italian father came to England he fell in love with and married a Liverpool girl. He brought to his new family his passion for food and instilled in them what all Italians know - that you live to eat instead of eating to live. This Italian mantra is the inspiration behind Nicky's delicious novels. Every summer the family left their home in Merseyside and returned to her father's home town, near Naples, in southern Italy. When Nicky met and married a New Zealander she moved to Auckland where she works as a journalist and edits a woman's magazine. She hoards her annual leave so that she and her husband can return to Italy to meet up with her family and to eat the best mozzarella and research her books. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation