Kiss Carlo - Softcover

From Adriana Trigiani, the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Shoemaker’s Wife, comes an exhilarating epic novel of love, loyalty, and creativity inspired by Shakespeare’s comedies—the story of an Italian-American family on the cusp of change.

It’s 1949 and South Philadelphia bursts with opportunity during the postwar boom. The Palazzini Cab Company and Western Union Telegraph Office, owned and operated by Dominic Palazzini and his three sons, are flourishing: business is good and they’re surrounded by sympathetic daughters-in-law and wives, with grandchildren on the way. But a decades-long feud that split Dominic, his brother, Mike, and their once-close families sets the stage for a rematch.  

Amid the hoopla, the arrival of an urgent telegram from Italy upends the life of Nicky Castone, an orphaned nephew who lives and works with his uncle Dom and his family, though he answers to Hortense Mooney, the cab company’s dispatcher, who has looked after him since he was a boy.Nicky decides, as he nears thirty, that he wants more—more than just a job driving Car No. 4 and more than his longtime fiancée, Peachy DePino, a bookkeeper, can offer. When he admits to his fiancée that he’s been secretly moonlighting at the local Shakespeare theater company, Nicky finds himself drawn to the stage, its colorful players, and to the determined Calla Borelli, who inherited the enterprise from her father. Nicky must choose the conventional life his family expects of him or chart a new course and risk losing everything he cherishes.

From the dreamy mountaintop village of Roseto Valfortore in Italy to the vibrant streets of South Philly to the close-knit enclave of Roseto, Pennsylvania, to New York City during the birth of the golden age of television,  Kiss Carlo is a powerful, intergenerational story that celebrates the ties that bind and staying true to oneself when all hope seems lost.