SOMETHING GREAT AND BEAUTIFUL
(A NOVEL OF LOVE, WALL STREET AND FOCACCIA)
Something Great and Beautiful, first written in English, is Enrico’s literary debut in the English language, to be published in the U.S. by Other Press in September 2018. The book was first published in Italy to wide critical acclaim under the title Ai nostri desideri.
Sympathetic good-for-nothing Rosso Fiorentino leaves the beautiful Italian Riviera to follow the woman he loves to America, and soon finds himself the hero of a darkly funny tale when his improbable business plan becomes all the rage on Wall Street.
Rosso Fiorentino, a charming loser who dreams of becoming a writer, falls in love with Chloé, a brilliant but troubled young woman. They cross paths in the coastal town of Portofino, and Rosso then enlists the help of his friends, a baker and a champion street peddler, to follow Chloé to America and sell focaccia on the streets of New York. While Rosso struggles to make a living with odd jobs, Chloé, now armed with a law degree, gets hired by a top Wall Street firm.
Rosso is eventually able to achieve his dream, opening a little bakery in Queens, followed by a second one on Broadway. The business is an instant success. The banks start throwing money at him, and in the blink of an eye the company undergoes the largest IPO in US history... until the bubble bursts and all gets played out in a New York courtroom.
This modern fairy tale about ambition, hubris, and love exposes with scintillating wit the absurdity of the 2008 global meltdown, and foreshadows the future in which we now live.
REVIEWS
“The true wolves of Wall Street from someone who knows them well,”— Vanity Fair.
"A dazzling story in which sex and finance are interwoven: I couldn't stop reading it."— Antonia Fraser Pinter, author of Marie Antoinette, and My Life with Harold Pinter, among others.
“I don’t know what it’s like to be rich and bedeviled, but Enrico Pellegrini does or at least the narrator of his Dionysian romp of a novel, To Our Desires, certainly does. With crystalline, delightful, surprising and above all exuberant prose, we are drawn irresistibly into this world of people whose lives ought to be so fun and easy, and turn out to be even more confusing and discombobulating than our own. If Aristophanes were alive today, he would write just like Enrico Pellegrini: he makes us laugh, with sympathy, at the gods disguised as people who are living among us.”—Clancy Martin, author of How to Sell, Love and Lies, and Bad Sex.
"What an improbable match: a story of love, Wall Street and focaccia! Delicious!"
Donald Bogle, author of Elizabeth and Michael: The Queen of Hollywood and the King of Pop, A Love Story
and Dorothy Dandridge: A Biography.
“An irresistible fairytale that makes you think and laugh. The writing is flamboyant and rich, the story conquers you,”— La Repubblica.
“A global fairytale. Italo Calvino’s lecture on ‘Lightness' couldn’t be better expressed than in this novel,”— La Stampa - Tutto Libri.
“We travel from Fitzgerald’s world of parties, to Balzac’s myth of money” – L’avvenire.
“Rivals The Big Short, you fly to the last page” — Il Fatto Quotidiano.
“An incredible parable of the Wall Street crisis” — L'Unità.
“If by reading Proust you wish to taste a Madeleine, by reading Pellegrini you crave focaccia” — Secolo XIX.