P.O. Box Love

In the first English translation of Calvetti’s 2009 epistolary novel, life imitates art when Milanese single mother Emma Gentili, 50, turns an inheritance into a shop devoted to romantic writing and discovers a note recently placed in a book by her high school sweetheart. Though Federico Virgili is now living in New York with his wife and daughter, and more than 30 years have passed, Emma agrees to dinner, and they begin a correspondence, rendezvousing a year later on an island off the coast of Brittany, where they finally give in to their attraction. Emma’s loving descriptions of her bookshop—its content and layout, staff and customers—are an ode to the written word and a wonderful backdrop. Calvetti’s evocative, unhurried prose is fittingly old-fashioned compared to modern communication, and bibliophiles will delight in the setting, passionate book talk, and fanciful anecdotes about the Morgan library and its first librarian, Belle de Costa Green, J.P. Morgan’s mistress. Federico’s letters to Emma are filled with romantic longing and moments of hand-wringing over their affair; Emma’s casual attitude toward infidelity, on the other hand, does nothing to dispel the stereotype of Europeans as disdainful of monogamy and may be a high hurdle for American readers to leap. Agent: Vicki Satlow, the Vicki Satlow Literary Agency. (Feb.)