P.O. Box Love: A Novel of Letters

by Paola Calvetti, Anne Milano Appel (Translator)

Overview

A charming epistolary novel that chronicles the love story between Emma and Frederico, former high school sweethearts who meet again thirty years later.

At Dreams&Desires, 50-year-old Emma's quaint bookshop in Milan dedicated to romantic fiction, the passionate bookseller serves coffee and tea to her customers and completes order slips in pen rather than using a computer. One day, she finds a mysterious handwritten note stuck between the pages of a novel. The message is from her high school sweetheart Frederico, who is now a successful architect in New York and whom she hasn't seen in thirty years. When she finally meets Frederico again, Emma is convinced that her life is about to turn into a romance novel - an intercontinental fairy tale between Milan and New York, between two post office boxes and two lovers that are separated by the Atlantic Ocean and half a life. But Frederico is married, and their epistolary romance, punctuated by once-a-year sojourns on the island of Belle Ile, seems to have no future. Paola Calvetti's PO Box Love is an ode to old-fashioned relationships (the ones that last a lifetime), old-fashioned habits (such as writing letters by hand in fountain pen) and old-fashioned notions (such as politeness, and the great lost art of conversation), and will enchant readers of such perennial favorites as 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff and Same Time Next Year by Bernard Slade.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429938174
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/31/2012
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	443 KB

About the Author

PAOLA CALVETTI has been a journalist with La Repubblica and a publicist for Milan's La Scala Opera. She is the author of five novels and lives in Milan.

Paola Calvetti has been a journalist with La Repubblica and a publicist for Milan's La Scala Opera. She is the author of several novels, including P.O. Box Love, and lives in Milan.
Anne Milano Appel, Ph.D., a former library director and language teacher, has been translating professionally for over fifteen years, and is a member of ALTA, ATA, NCTA and PEN. Many of her book-length translations have been published, and shorter works that she has authored or translated have appeared in other professional and literary venues.