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by Fabio Bartolomei
Diego is a forty-something car salesman with a talent for telling half-truths. Fausto sells watches over the phone. Claudio manages (barely) his family-owned neighborhood supermarket. The characteristic common to each of these three men is their abject mediocrity. Yet, mediocrity being the mother of outrageous invention, they embark on a project that would be too ambitious in scope for any single one of them, let alone all three together. They decide to flee the city and to open a rustic holiday farmhouse in the Italian countryside outside Naples. Things would have been challenging enough for these three unlikely entrepreneurs, but when a local mobster arrives and demands they pay him protection money things go from bad to worse. Now their ordinary (if wrongheaded) attempt to run a small business in an area that organized crime syndicates consider their own becomes a quixotic act of defiance.
A "miraculous" Italian comedy that will delight and surprise readers, Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles marks Fabio Bartolomei's vivid debut.
"A melancholy yet hopeful fable told with a smile." - Internazionale (Italy)
"Bartolomei's style is swift and immensely readable." - Flaneri (Italy)
"Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles left the kind of smile on my face that doesn't go unnoticed and which people often mistake for a kind of facial paralysis…Bortolomei is attentive to the proper rhythm of a story, the proper way to reveal plot, to what is and is not the right word in the right place, all of which produced exactly the right effect on this reader." - Setteperuno (Italy)
This information about Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Fabio Bartolomei works in advertising and lives in Rome. Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles is his first novel.
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