A Year at Hotel Gondola by Nicky Pellegrino

Paperback: 305 pages                                                                                                
Genre: Contemporary, Romance, Chick Lit
Publisher: Orion 2018
Source: Won in a Prize Draw I entered via Twitter, courtesy of  @thebooktrailer @orionbooks @nickypellegrino
First Sentence: There is no sadder feeling than being jealous of your own life.
Review Quote: 'Warm, engaging and truly delicious' Rosanna Ley, author.
Main Character: Kat Black
Setting: Venice, Italy
My Opinions: Having lived the Italian dream myself for a number of years, it is always a pleasure to lose myself in a story written by an author whose passion for Italy is obvious. From the delightful way she writes about the sights and smells to the detail of including some authentic recipes in her storyline. This is the fourth novel I have read by Nicky Pellegrino, surely a good recommendation in itself. She writes in such a way that I feel myself drifting off to the world she writes about, so far always set in my beloved Italy, but each novel portrays a different Italian world. This time she transports us to the magical city of Venice.
A novel recommended for those Italophiles that cannot resist another story set in Italy, fans of the author's writing, or indeed anyone interested in travelling via the pages of novels.



Précis Courtesy of Goodreads:

Kat has never wanted to live a small life. She's an adventurer, a food writer who travels the world visiting far-flung places and eating unusual things. Now she is about to embark on her biggest adventure yet - a relationship.

She has fallen in love with an Italian man and is moving to live with him in Venice where she will help him run his small guest house, Hotel Gondola. Kat has lined up a book deal and will write about the first year of her new adventure, the food she eats, the recipes she collects, the people she meets, the man she doesn't really know all that well but is going to make a life with.

But as Kat ought to know by now, the thing about adventures is that they never go exactly the way you expect them to...


Video Trailer for 'A Year at Hotel Gondola' Courtesy of YouTube

My earlier reviews for Nicky Pellegrino Novels:

Recipe For Life    The Italian Wedding    When in Rome


Author Profile:

Nicky Pellegrino's Italian father came to England and fell in love with a Liverpool girl which is where Nicky was born on the first of January 1964. She grew up in Liverpool, then as an adult she worked in London as a magazine journalist.  Twenty one years ago she went on holiday to New Zealand and met her now husband, Carne Bidwell at a wedding.

When Nicky first started writing fiction it was her memories of childhood summers in Italy that came flooding back and flavoured her stories: the passions, the feuds but most of all the food. It is her father's Italian mantra that you 'live to eat not eat to live' that is one of the inspirations behind Nicky's delicious novels.

She works as a freelance journalist, has weekly columns in the Herald on Sunday newspaper and the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly and her novels are distributed in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and have been translated into 12 languages.

She now lives near a beach in Auckland with her husband and their dogs Charlie the standard poodle and Lucy the pointer. Nicky spends her time writing novels, working as a freelance journalist, riding her two horses, growing vegetables, cooking, trying to get other people to cook for her, eating and reading. There isn't much time for anything else except a little light housework.
Her all-time favourite book is To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee and my book of 2013 was Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.


Photographs, Trailer and Biographical Information courtesy of the following sites.

Nicky Pellegrino - Goodreads Profile     Twitter Profile    Author Facebook Profile

 Nicky Pellegrino - Official Author Website     Nicky Pellegrino - Instagram

Amazon Author Page   YouTube