Adriana Trigiani

Ave Maria Mulligan, a thirty-five-year-old spinster in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, is jolted out of her rut when her mother reveals a shocking secret, and things become even more exciting when Elizabeth Taylor announces plans to visit the sleepy town.

When fourteen-year-old Viola is sent from her beloved Brooklyn to boarding school in Indiana for ninth grade, she overcomes her initial reservations as she makes friends with her roommates, goes on a real date, and uses the unsettling ghost she keeps seeing as the subject of a short film--her first.

Thirty three year old Valentine Roncalli, faced with the seemingly impossible task of helping her family's Greenwich Village shoe business rebound from financial ruin, travels to Tuscany in search of techniques and materials which will help her rebuild the company, and while she is there, she learns a

Shoemaker Valentine Roncalli is devastated when her grandmother announces Valentine's brother and nemesis Alfred will be taking over the family shoe business, but an affair with a notorious playboy and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity offer Valentine a chance at building her own life and reveal a dark secret that could destroy her family.