Robert Hellenga

#2

1994

The Italians called them "Mud Angels," the young foreigners who came to Florence in 1966 to save the city's treasured art from the Arno's flooded banks. American volunteer Margot Harrington was one of them, finding her niche in the waterlogged library of a Carmelite convent. Within its walls she discovered a priceless Renaissance masterwork: a sensuous volume of sixteen erotic poems and drawings. Inspired to sample each of the ineffable sixteen pleasures, Margot embarks on the intrigue of a lifetime with a forbidden lover and the contraband volume—a sensual, life-altering journey of loss and rebirth in this exquisite novel of spiritual longing and earthly desire.

#3

1998

The Fall of a Sparrow examines the reawakening of life after a young woman has tragically died. At the heart of the novel is Alan Woodhull ("Woody"), a classics professor at a small midwestern college, whose beloved oldest daughter, Cookie, is killed during a terrorist bombing in Italy. Seven years after the bombing, Woody finds himself standing in the cemetery where Cookie is buried, convinced that life has taught him all the lessons he has to learn. His wife has left him, and his two remaining daughters have grown up and moved away. Yet a new life, which Woody both longs for and resists, begins with his decision to attend the trial of the terrorists responsible for his daughter's death. And as Woody gradually emerges from his sorrow, returning to Italy and the scene of the tragedy, he also awakens to new love.