Two feuding families, two love stories - and a lot of delicious Italian food.
Pieta Martinelli's sister is getting married. Since she is a bridal designer it falls to her to make the wedding gown. But Pieta is distracted by a series of unanswered questions. Why is her father feuding with another Italian in the neighbourhood? Why is her mother so faded and sad? And could the man she's always held a torch for really be getting married to someone else?
As Pieta stitches and beads her sister's wedding gown she uncovers the secrets that have made her family what it is and that stand...

Escape to Italy with this sumptuous story of secrets and friendships under Mediterranean skies.
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...

Four friends, a sun-drenched escape, and a holiday that will change everything...

THE VILLA GIRLS is the story of four young women who decide that wherever they are in the world and whatever they're doing they'll meet every few years for a holiday together somewhere sunny. Despite life taking them in very different directions, their snatched days in the sun in little hidden villas are crucial to them all. Escape, celebration, recovery - over the years the holidays change their lives.

Rosie was always the odd one out - initially only invited as the others felt sorry for her, but...

Raffaella Moretti, by far the most beautiful girl in the southern Italian town of Triento, is about to marry the only boy she has ever loved. It seems that nothing but happiness lies in store for her. Yet, just one year later, she is a widow, and has taken a job as housekeeper in the Villa Rosa, working for a young American.
As Raffaella struggles to recapture her lost happiness she starts looking for ways to help those around her to do the same. There is Silvana the baker's wife, her passion barely hidden; Carlotta the gardener's daughter with her mysterious grief, and the kind and...

Rome in the 1950s, there's nowhere quite like it. The narrow stone streets, the fountains and piazzas full of life in the heat of the day, the cafes and bars full of music and desire by night...This is where Serafina calls home. Having grown up with her sisters in a tiny apartment tucked in the top of a tumbledown building, she has watched her mother get by on next to nothing, and turn herself beautiful with a sweep of eyeliner and a hand-sewn dress. When her mother goes out, Serafina and her sisters go singing in the nearest piazza, busking for spare change and cinema tickets. The girls long...

Luca Amore runs cooking holidays in the Sicilian mountain town of Favio. As he readies himself for yet another course he expects it to be much like all the others. He will cook, he will take his clients to visit vineyards and olive groves, they will eat together, become friends, and they will head home to whatever corner of the globe they came from. But there is a surprise in store for Luca. This time there are four women booked in to the cooking school - all of whom are at turning points in their lives.

My heart is less than 1% of my body, it weighs hardly anything; it is only a tiny piece of me, yet it is the part everyone finds most interesting. Vivi Palmer knows what it's like to live life carefully. Born with a heart defect, she was given a second chance after a transplant, but has never quite dared to make the most of it. Until she comes face-to-face with her donor's mother, Grace, who wants something in return for Vivi's second-hand heart: her help to find all the other people who have tiny pieces of her son. Reluctantly drawn into Grace's mission, Vivi's journalist training...