Very Valentine

Very Valentine

Reflecting a novelist and screenwriter Adriana Trigian's own Italian heritage, Very Valentine is a contemporary family saga set around the Angelini Shoe Company, makers of custom wedding shoes, in Manhattan since 1903. One of the last family businesses in Greenwich Village and on the brink of financial ruin, it falls to 33-year-old Valentine Roncalli, the talented but unsuspecting apprentice, to save her grandparents' legacy.

In the meantime, Valentine is also trying to juggle a relationship with a very sedxy chef, her duty to her crazy, drama-fuelled family and a design competition that could save her family business! Looking for inspiration (and sanity), Valentine accompanies her grandmother and master artisan Teodora to Italy where she finds more than the design for the perfect shoe.

Headed by the utterly enchanting leading lady, Valentine (long known as the 'funny' sister who is the glue holding her large Italian family together), Very Valentine is the first in a trilogy that will follow the Roncalli and Angelini families.

Sassy and funny Very Valentine is the ultimate way to spend a wintery weekend remembering how fun reading really is!

Adriana Trigiani was born sometime in the late 60s (she's older than Britney but younger than Madonna), to a large Italian family in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. It was the town that never made it, famous only for the play, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and an unfortunate event where Elizabeth Taylor visited, chocked on a chicken bone and was airlifted out.

So at the age of 21, after graduating from university, she moved to New York City, checked into an all-girl boarding house and began a series of office jobs by day (from which she was fired), whilst appearing as part of a all-female comedy group by night. It was during this time she was hired to write for a sitcom starring Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal in Los Angeles and met her best friend and fellow writer Michael Patrick King (writer, producer, director of Sex and the City). She also wrote on such shows a s The Cosby Show, A Different World and the one that never made it, Heaves to Betsy starring Dolly Parton.

In 1994 Adriana married Tim- a TV lighting engineer, and they set up home in an old brownstone in the Meatpacking District of Greenwich Village. It was the mid 90s and 'the only folks you'd see on my street after dark were Cher, Barbra Steisand and Bette Midler, well actually, just men dressed up as them- eating cup cakes on our steps'. Then, Michael Patrick King returned to New York City to try his luck on a fledgling show called Sex and The City and moved into the top two floors of Adriana's house whilst she and Tim lived in the ground floors. In the middle of the stairs is the laundry room where she and Michael met to write, she her novels and Michael his scripts fro Sex and The City.

The years passed, Adriana wrote a number of bestselling novels including Lucia, Ludica and Big Stone Gap and, in join production with Tim, Lucia their daughter arrived (giving Michael all the material he needed for Miranda's pregnancy on Sex and The City). Adriana and Michael are still writing in the laundry, except on Tuesdays when the cleaner comes.

She is currently casting the movie version of her first novel, Big Stone Gap, which she will also direct.

Very Valentine
Simon and Schuster Australia
Author: Adriana Trigiani
ISBN: 9781847370860
Price: $29.95