P.O. Box Love
A Novel of Letters
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A charming epistolary novel that chronicles the love story between Emma and Frederico, former high school sweethearts who meet again thirty years later.
At Dreams & Desires, 50-year-old Emma's quaint bookshop in Milan dedicated to romantic fiction, the passionate bookseller serves coffee and tea to her customers and completes order slips in pen rather than using a computer. One day, she finds a mysterious handwritten note stuck between the pages of a novel. The message is from her high school sweetheart Frederico, who is now a successful architect in New York and whom she hasn't seen in thirty years. When she finally meets Frederico again, Emma is convinced that her life is about to turn into a romance novel - an intercontinental fairy tale between Milan and New York, between two post office boxes and two lovers that are separated by the Atlantic Ocean and half a life. But Frederico is married, and their epistolary romance, punctuated by once-a-year sojourns on the island of Belle Ile, seems to have no future. Paola Calvetti's PO Box Love is an ode to old-fashioned relationships (the ones that last a lifetime), old-fashioned habits (such as writing letters by hand in fountain pen) and old-fashioned notions (such as politeness, and the great lost art of conversation), and will enchant readers of such perennial favorites as 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff and Same Time Next Year by Bernard Slade.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the first English translation of Calvetti's 2009 epistolary novel, life imitates art when Milanese single mother Emma Gentili, 50, turns an inheritance into a shop devoted to romantic writing and discovers a note recently placed in a book by her high school sweetheart. Though Federico Virgili is now living in New York with his wife and daughter, and more than 30 years have passed, Emma agrees to dinner, and they begin a correspondence, rendezvousing a year later on an island off the coast of Brittany, where they finally give in to their attraction. Emma's loving descriptions of her bookshop its content and layout, staff and customers are an ode to the written word and a wonderful backdrop. Calvetti's evocative, unhurried prose is fittingly old-fashioned compared to modern communication, and bibliophiles will delight in the setting, passionate book talk, and fanciful anecdotes about the Morgan library and its first librarian, Belle de Costa Green, J.P. Morgan's mistress. Federico's letters to Emma are filled with romantic longing and moments of hand-wringing over their affair; Emma's casual attitude toward infidelity, on the other hand, does nothing to dispel the stereotype of Europeans as disdainful of monogamy and may be a high hurdle for American readers to leap.
