The Sixteen Pleasures

(Paperback)

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Description

Margot Harrington is a mud angel' - what Italians call the foreigners who come to Florence in 1966 to salvage the city's priceless art from the Arno's flooded riverbanks. An American expert in book conservancy, she is on a mission to save a waterlogged convent library when she stumbles upon a rare, valuable collection of sixteen erotic drawings and their accompanying sonnets. As she faces pressure from the abbess to sell the volume, she plunges headlong into an affair with an older, married Italian man who shares her passion for the written word.'

Reviews

Praise for The Sixteen Pleasures

Part mystery, part romance, part guidebook. A lively first novel that communicates the heady peril, as well as the adventure, of Florence after the flood.
The New York Times Book Review

Elegantly moving. Everything about the narrator and heroine of this novel is appealing right from the first paragraph.
The New Yorker

An erotic book about an erotic book. At the same time, we receive a crash course in Italian cuisine, convent life, the European railway system and the delicate labor involved in restoring flood-damaged works of art.
Maxine Kumin, author of Where I Live

A terrific, swift novel about being in love with Italy, Italian art and Italians. If theres such a thing as an art thriller, this is it.
John Casey, author of Spartina

This novel offers the reader a luxurious feast of pleasuresmany many more than sixteen.
Tillie Olsen, author of Tell Me a Riddle

ThoughThe Sixteen Pleasuresis initially in the tradition of American innocent goes abroad to encounter European experience, Hellenga's depth (and lightness) of characterization and description lift it high above its genre. And what better book than one about loving and loving books
Amazon

Fascinating entertainment . . . with a sympathetic heroine, a suspenseful plot, a cast of colorful characters and illuminating meditations on life, art and love.
Chicago Tribune

A rewarding read, with a witty heroine, a marvelous setting, and lots of fascinating detail about book conservation and the restoration of art.
Booklist

A wonderfully rich and absorbing story . . . Hellenga forms Florentine art, nuns, erotica, and American know-how into a kind of della Robbia arrangement of juicy forbidden fruit.
Kirkus Reviews

Author Bio

Robert Hellenga was educated at the University of Michigan and Princeton University. His novels include The Fall of a Sparrow, Blues Lessons, The Italian Lover, and The Confessions of Frances Godwin. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two Illinois Arts Council grants, and a PEN Fiction Award.