Delicious - Nicky Pellegrino

Italy, 1964. Maria Domenica is the eldest daughter of Pepina and Erminio Carrozza, a farming family from the tiny southern village of San Giulio. At sixteen, Maria's life is limited to the confines of her mother's rural kitchen - where she bakes bread every morning, the way the Carrozza women always have - and the Caffe Angeli, a place of friendship, strong espresso and famous ricotta sfolgliatelle. Her parents have high hopes for their beautiful first-born, but she has other plans.

Maria runs away to Rome but, one year later, she returns to San Giulio in disgrace - eight months pregnant with the identity of the father a mystery. Hastily, shamefully, she is married off to a neighbour's son. But she soon escapes again, this time to England, where she searches once more for a new life for herself and her daughter, Chiara.

Many years later, it is Chiara, not Maria, who finds herself drawn back to San Giulio - to the dusty little piazza, to the enticing aromas of the Caffe Angeli and to her long-lost family. But she soon discovers that the simple Italian life she seeks is not as simple as it seems - particularly where the past is concerned.

DELICIOUS is an irresistible saga - written with all the freshness and warmth of a Carrozza family recipe - about the enduring love affair between Italy and England, about three very different generations of Italian women, and an old kitchen in Campania that binds them all together.