Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles

<p><b>A raucous debut novel of organized—and unorganized—crime. “A story that takes itself unseriously enough to be funny” (<i>The Daily Beast</i>, “This Week’s Hot Reads”).</b><br><br>Diego is a forty-something car salesman with a talent for telling half-truths. Fausto sells watches over the phone. Claudio manages (barely) his family-owned neighborhood supermarket. The characteristic common to each of these three men is their abject mediocrity. Yet, mediocrity being the mother of outrageous invention, they embark on a project that would be too ambitious in scope for any single one of them, let alone all three together. They decide to flee the city and to open a rustic holiday farmhouse in the Italian countryside outside Naples.<br>Their misconceived endeavor would have been challenging enough for these three unlikely entrepreneurs, but when a local mobster arrives and demands they pay him protection money, things go from bad to worse. Now their ordinary (if wrongheaded) attempt to run a small business in an area that organized crime syndicates consider their own becomes a quixotic act of defiance.<br>A “miraculous” Italian comedy that will have readers laughing out loud, <em>Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles</em> marks Fabio Bartolomei’s vivid debut.<br><br>“An entertaining and humorous debut.”—<i>La Repubblica</i><br><br>“A melancholy yet hopeful fable told with a smile.”—<i>Internazionale</i><br><br>“Left the kind of smile on my face that doesn’t go unnoticed and which people often mistake for a kind of facial paralysis.”—Valentina Aversano, <i>Setteperuno</i></p>