THE ITALIAN WEDDING
Nicky Pellegrino -- Orion – NZ$38.99

I knew I was going to enjoy this novel before I even opened it.
The back & front covers are most appealing and along with the cover byline that reads “ Two feuding families, two love stories and a feast of delicious Italian food” all combined to have me salivating before I had read a line.

Italian food is my favourite cuisine and so I was delighted to find that the novel opens with Beppi’s Recipe for Mellanzane alla Parmigiana – this is a cheesy, tomato-y aubergine dish which I hope to make this coming weekend.

Beppi Martinelli is an Italian, married to an Englishwoman and living in London with his wife and two young adult daughters. He owns a restaurant called Little Italy and the younger of his two daughters works with him, while the other, the principal character in the novel, Pieta, is a designer of bridal gowns.
The younger sister is soon to be married and Pieta is, of course making the gown. As she stitches and beads the wedding dress her mother helps and in the course of their time together her mother tells her how she came to hitch-hike to Rome all those years before where she met and fell in love and married Beppi and how she eventually persuaded him to return to London with her.
So there are two stories running parallel through the novel, stories of two generations of the Martinelli family. They are stories of love, food (lots of food), family feuds, cultural dislocations and generational differences.

I enjoyed The Italian Wedding very much although have to say that even though it is just a four pages short of 300 pages in length, about the average size novel, I wished it had been longer. I wanted to know more about the characters that populate the novel. I reckon if author Nicky Pellegrino was an Indian writer rather than an NZ Italian author then the book may have been 600 pages! Perhaps there will be a sequel? I hope so.

This is Pellegrino’s third novel, the earlier titles being Delicious and The Gypsy Tearoom. Uncommonly for a NZ-based novelist she is published in the UK, by Orion, and her books are widely translated.
She dedicates this book to her parents who on the face of it sound very much like Beppi & Caterina Martinelli though in her postscript she states that while her parents’ story is the base that gave the book its flavor Beppi and Caterina are not her mother and father.
In real life though her mother did hitch-hike to Italy with her girlfriends where she met her future husband in Rome and took him home to the UK.

Later Nicky was born and her father, clearly a skilled chef, (Beppi’s recipes in the book are apparently her father’s recipes), instilled in her a passion for food and taught her what all Italians know that you live to eat instead of eating to live.
Nicky (pic right) later met and married a New Zealander and moved with him to Auckland where now lives and where she works as the books editor at the Herald on Sunday and writes novels.

The Italian Wedding, a feast of food and love, a terrific read,(she has a style that reminds me somewhat of a cross between Irish writer Maeve Binchy and another NZ author published in the UK, Sarah-Kate Lynch), this book will I am sure will become a great favourite of book groups.
FOOTNOTE:
I see that in the UK the book has been published in hardcover and also as an EBook. Nicky Pellegrino may be the first NZ author to have a novel published simultaneously in paper and electronic forms. Somewhat surprisingly the EBook and the hardcover prices are almost the same at pds.18.58 (EBook) and pds.18.99 respectively.
In NZ and Australia the book is being published as a trade paperback. Methinks the days of hardcover fiction are numbered.