In this delightful second installment in Alexander McCall Smith's bestselling detective series, the irrepressibly curious Isabel Dalhousie gets caught up in a highly unusual affair of the heart. When Isabel is asked to cover for vacationing Cat at her delicatessen, Isabel meets a man with a most interesting problem. He recently had a heart transplant and is suddenly haunted by memories of events that never happened to him. The situation piques her...

"Depicts the struggle, the vicissitudes, and the internal and external growth of a platoon of young Italian soldiers that are sent for the first time on a mission to the forward operating base (FOB) Ice in Gulistan, Afghanistan, which the writer described as 'a sandy enclosure exposed to adversity.' During the night the camp is obscured: it is invisible, there are no man-made or natural noises, only the incessant activity of the human body that penetrates...

Two Italian women figure out their lives while in New York City.

"Mere weeks after the 1992 riots that laid waste to Los Angeles, Eugenia, a typical Italian teenager, is rudely yanked from her privileged Roman milieu by her hippie-ish filmmaker parents and transplanted to the strange suburban world of the San Fernando Valley. With only the Virgin Mary to call on for guidance as her parents struggle to make it big--Hollywood fashion--she must navigate her huge new public high school, complete with Crips and Bloods...

In March of 1887, Rocco, an eleven-year-old from an Italian village, arrives in New York City where he is forced to live in squalor and beg for money as a street musician, but he finds the city's cruelty to children and animals intolerable and sets out to make things better, whatever the cost to himself.

Looks into the 1897 diary of Captain Simonini, an antisemitic Italian in Paris who forges documents for the highest bidder, providing conspiracies and scapegoats for factions all over Europe, and is behind the most notorious forgery of all.