The Ice-Cream Makers
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Publisher Description
A dazzling novel about an Italian ice-cream dynasty, tradition, ambition, and the sensation of lemon sorbet melting on your tongue.
In the far north of Italy lies the valley of the ice-cream makers: about a dozen villages where, for generations, people have specialised in making ice cream. Giuseppe Talamini claims it was actually invented here. Every spring his family sets off for the ice-cream parlour in Rotterdam, returning to the mountains only in winter.
Eldest son Giovanni Talamini decides to break with this tradition by pursuing a literary career. But then one day his younger brother Luca approaches him with a highly unusual request. Now Giovanni faces a dilemma: serve the family’s interests one last time or choose his own path in life, once and for all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Van der Kwast (Mama Tandoori) returns to themes of family, legacy, and tradition in this novel about a poet returning home to Northern Italy to help run his family's ice cream company. The Calamine family has been in the ice cream business for three generations, making yearly trips to the Netherlands to sell hand-churned ice cream ever since Giovanni Calamine's great-grandfather started the business, establishing their strong reputation on these seasonal trips. Ice cream has been the family's passion for decades, and when Giovanni decides that he wants something else for his life, his father and brother see the choice as a betrayal of a family legacy. Van der Kwast jumps around the Calamine family tree to reveal a complex web of duty and love that ties the family to the dream of the original patriarch and uncovers how that dream has transformed through the years. Although plot takes a back seat to a thoughtful portrait of the family, van der Kwast ultimately tells a moving story of how sacrifices accumulate in the wake of passions left unfulfilled.
