Encore Valentine

Encore Valentine

As Encore Valentine begins, snow falls like glitter over Tuscany at the wedding of Valentine's grandmother. Meet the Roncalli and Angelini families, artisans of handcrafted shoes in Greenwich Village since 1903. Valentine's dreams are dashed when her grandmother names her brother and nemesis Alfred her partner at Angelini Shoes. A long-distance romance with the sexy Ginaluca who lives in remote Tuscany seems impossible so Valentine tries to devote herself to her work.

A once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity takes Valentine to Buenos Aires, where she finds a long-buried secret hidden deep within a family scandal. Once unearthed, the truth rocks the Roscallis, but Valentine is determined to hold her family together. More so, she longs to create one of her own, but is torn between a past love that nurtured her, and a new one that promises to sustain her.

Trigiani's sumptuous descriptions and endearing characters make this the perfect book to read and savour on an autumn weekend.

Adriana Trigiani was born sometime in the late 60s (she's older than Britney but younger than Madonna), to a large Italian family in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. It was the town that never made it, famous only by the play, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and an unfortunate event where Elizabeth Taylor visited, chocked on a chicken bone and was airlifted out.

So at the age of 21 after graduating from university, she moved to New York City, checked into an all-girl boarding house and began a series of office jobs by day (from which she was fired), whilst appearing as apart of an all-female comedy group by night. It was during this time she was hired to write for a sitcom starring Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal in Los Angeles and met her best friend and fellow writer Michael Patrick King (writer, producer, director of Sex and the City). She also wrote on such shows as The Cosby Show, A Different World and the one that never made it, Heavens to Betsy, starring Dolly Parton.

In 1994 Adriana married Tim- a TV lighting engineer, and they set up home in an old brownstone in the Meatpacking District of Greenwich Village. It was the mid 90s, and 'the only folks you'd see on my street after dark were Cher, Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler, well, actually just men dressed up as them- eating cup cakes on our steps' . Then, Michael Patrick King returned to New York City to try his luck on a fledgling show called Sex and the City and moved into the top two floors of Adriana's house whilst she and Tom lived in the ground floors. In the middle of the stairs is the laundry room where she and Michael met to write, she her novels and Michael his scripts for Sex and the City.

The years passed, Adriana wrote a number of bestselling novels including Lucia, Lucia and Home to Big Stone Gap and, in joint production with Tim, Lucia their daughter arrived (giving Michael all the material he needed for Miranda's pregnancy on Sex and the City). Adriana and Michael are still writing in the laundry, except on Tuesdays when the cleaner comes.

She is currently directing the movie version of her first novel, Home to Big Stone Gap.

Encore Valentine
Simon and Schuster
Author: Adriana Trigiani
ISBN: 9781847379634
Price: $32.99