The movie business is booming in 1935 when twenty-one-year-old Loretta Young meets thirty-four-year-old Clark Gable on the set of The Call of the Wild. Though he's already married, Gable falls for the stunning and vivacious young actress instantly. Far from the glittering lights of Hollywood, Sister Alda Ducci has been forced to leave her convent and begin a new journey that leads her to Loretta. Becoming Miss Young's secretary, the innocent and pious...

Ave Maria faces unexpected tests of her faith, conscience, and understanding as her daughter, Etta, confronts adulthood, her friends in Big Stone Gap deal with major life changes of their own, and her husband sets out to reinvent his life.

The majestic and haunting beauty of the Italian Alps at the turn of the twentieth century is the setting for the first meeting of Enza and Ciro, who meet as teenagers despite growing up in villages just a few miles apart. But when Ciro catches the local priest in a scandal, he is banished from his village and sent to hide in America as an apprentice to a shoemaker in Little Italy. Without explanation, he leaves a bereft Enza behind. Soon Enza's family...

Ave Maria Mulligan, a thirty-five-year-old spinster in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, is jolted out of her rut when her mother reveals a shocking secret, and things become even more exciting when Elizabeth Taylor announces plans to visit the sleepy town.

Eight years after her marriage Ave Maria Mulligan Mac discovers that the mountains she has dug roots into cannot shelter her from painful lessons of the heart. Almost everyone in the town has advice for her, but when she takes her daughter to Italy for the summer, her passion and a seductive stranger will test her marriage and push her to choose the man who is truly her destiny.

"Matelda, the Cabrelli family’s matriarch, has always been brusque and opinionated. Now, as she faces the end of her life, she is determined to share a long-held secret with her family about her own mother’s great love story: with her childhood friend, Silvio, and with dashing Scottish sea captain John Lawrie McVicars, the father Matelda never knew. . . . In the halcyon past, Domenica Cabrelli thrives in the coastal town of Viareggio until her...

Nestled in the lush Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the town of Big Stone Gap has been home to Ave Maria Mulligan MacChesney and her family for generations. She's been married to her beloved Jack for nearly twenty years, raised one child and buried another, and run a business that binds her community together, all while holding close her tight circle of family and friends. But with her daughter Etta, having flown the nest to Italy, Ave Maria has...

The daughter of an Italian immigrant family in 1950 Greenwich Village, Lucia Sartori pursues a career in the fashion industry until she falls in love with a handsome stranger, who must win over her traditional family to marry her.

"Helping her Mama decorate the house, bake cupcakes, and make valentines for all six of her siblings for Valentine's Day, Mia Valentina Amore wonders if her Mama has forgotten her when she doesn't receive her own valentine"--