The Sixteen Pleasures

After ten years, Robert Hellenga’s critically acclaimed mystery-romance set in Florence returns to Soho.

Margot Harrington is a mud angel -what Italians call the foreigners who come to Florence in 1966 to salvage the city’s priceless art from the Arno’s flooded riverbanks. An American expert in book conservancy, she is on a mission to save a waterlogged convent library when she stumbles upon a rare, valuable collection of sixteen erotic drawings and their accompanying sonnets. As she faces pressure from the abbess to sell the volume, she plunges headlong into an affair with an older, married Italian man who shares her passion for the written word.