Showing results by author "Lily Prior" in All Categories

en a lonely olive grower, Arcadio Carnabuci, sows his love seeds, he cannot imagine the chaos his magic fruit will bring. While Fernanda Ponderosa, the voluptuous woman of his dreams, evades his spell, Gezabel, a hardworking middle-aged mule, falls head over hooves in love with him. And, as Gezabel discovers, she is not the only one whose stars cross as the olive grower's ardor casts its magic over the region. Suddenly, the butcher and the baker are thinking murder, the village doctor and his nurse are driven to distraction, and a newborn is transformed into an angel.

Ramona Drottoveo, an albino, is a chambermaid at a lush Italian estate. Distinguished by the intoxicating scent she exudes, Ramona is despised by all women and adored by all men, whose inexhaustible lust she eagerly satisfies. Life changes when her husband dies after discovering his bride with another man on their wedding night. Blamed for his death, Ramona and her lover are exiled to the neighboring city of Naples.

Freda, a struggling mortician in working-class Rome, only married her repulsive ventriloquist husband, Alberto, because it was prophesied that she'd do so. Now that he's vanished mysteriously along with his equally abhorrent dummy (who Freda suspects is actually a midget), she'd like them both to stay missing - though she's devastated by the simultaneous disappearance of her soul mate, Pierino, her beloved talking parrot.

Since childhood, Rosa Fiore—daughter of a sultry Sicilian matriarch and her hapless husband—found solace in her family’s kitchen. La Cucina, the heart of the family’s lush estate, was a place where generations of Fiore women prepared sumptuous feasts and where the drama of extended...