"Mud angels" is what the Italians call the selfless young foreigners who come to Florence in 1966 to save the city's priceless art from the Arno's flooded rivrbanks.Margot Harrington is an American volunteer, an expert at book conservancy. While struggling to save a waterlogged convent library, she discovers a fabulous volume of sixteen erotic drawings by Giulio Romano that accompany sixteen steamy sonnets by Pietro Aretino. When published more than four centuries earlier, the Vati...

Chas. Johnson & Sons, a venerated rare bookstore in urban Chicago, has been a family operation for three generations―grandfather, father and son. But when it comes time for Gabe Johnson to take the reins of the business, the world of books has changed, and the combination of the Internet and inner city rents forces the store to close. But instead of folding his hand, Gabe decides to risk everything he has and reopen the shop―and, in a sense restart his life―in a small town on the shores of...

The Confessions of Frances Godwin is the fictional memoir of a retired high school Latin teacher looking back on a life of trying to do her best amidst transgressions-starting with her affair with Paul, whom she later marries. Now that Paul is dead and she's retired, Frances Godwin thinks her story is over-but of course the rest of her life is full of surprises, including the truly shocking turn of events that occurs when she takes matters into her own hands after her daughter Stella's hus...

The Truth About Death," the title novella of this virtuosic collection, is a masterpiece of sardonic humor that confronts Death head on and emerges bloody but unbowed. Simon, an undertaker, embalms his own father and faces his own death. Louisa, Simon's mother, makes peace with her husband over his dead body in a cooler in the basement of the funeral home. Simon contemplates the mystery of death over a plate of spaghetti cacio e pepe in Rome with an Italian undertaker. The dog, Ma...

Growing up on his family's orchards in Appleton, Michigan, in the 1950s, Martin Dijksterhuis finds everything he needs in his extended family and in the land itself -- in the reassuring routines of growing and harvesting, spraying and pruning. Although his mother wants him to get out of Appleton, which she finds impossibly provincial, and attend a great university -- the University of Chicago, her alma mater -- he has no desire to leave.In the autumn of his junior year of high schoo...

Jackson Jones is trying to decide whether to remain an anthropology professor in his small Midwestern town, or to return to doing fieldwork among the Mbuti people, in their African Garden of Eden. His ruminations are interrupted by the arrival of a late friend's niece, who has just been sprung from jail. Sunny admits that she shot her husband, an evangelical pastor from the Little Egypt region of Illinois, but he had it coming after forcing her to take on a rattle snake. As an anthropologi...

An exhilarating novel of romance, art, and food in Florence, featuring the beloved Margot Harrington, who graced Robert Hellenga's The Sixteen Pleasures.Margot Harrington's memoir about her discovery in Florence of a priceless masterwork of Renaissance erotica -- and the misguided love affair it inspired - is now, 25 years later, being made into a movie. Margot, with the help of her lover, Woody, writes a script that she thinks will validate her life. Of co...

An unforgettable novel about a man's search for meaning.

After the violent death of his oldest daughter during a terrorist bombing, small town college professor Alan "Woody" Woodhall finds himself standing in the cemetery where she was buried. Woody is convinced that life has taught him all the lessons he has to learn: His wife has left him, and his two remaining daughters have grown up and moved away. Yet a new life, which Woody both longs for and resists, begins with his decision to attend the trial of the terrorists responsible for his daught...

I was twenty-nine years old when the Arno flooded its banks on Friday, 4 November 1966. On Tuesday I decided to go to Italy, to offer my services as a humble book conservator, to save whatever could be saved, including myself.The Italians called them "Mud Angels," the young foreigners who came to Florence in 1966 to save the city's treasured art from the Arno's flooded banks. American volunteer Margot Harrington was one of them, finding her niche in the waterlogged library...

Chas. Johnson & Sons has been a family operation for three generations—grandfather, father, and son. But when it comes time for Gabe Johnson to take the reins of the business, the world of books has changed, and the combination of the internet and inner city rents forces the store to close. But instead of folding his hand, Gabe decides to risk everything he has and reopen the shop—and, in a sense restart his life—in a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan. Haunted his entire life by an...

On the morning of his fortieth birthday, anthropology professor Jackson Jones contemplates his future: Should he go back to Africa, where he did his fieldwork, and live with the Mbuti, or should he marry and settle down in the Midwest, where he now teaches?On the morning of her release from prison, Sunny, who grew up in a snake-handling church in the Little Egypt region of Southern Illinois, rents a garage apartment from Jackson. She's been serving a five-year sentence for shooting...