Margot Harrington Books In Order
- The Sixteen Pleasures (1994)
- The Italian Lover (2007)
Novels
- The Fall of a Sparrow (1998)
- Blues Lessons (2001)
- Philosophy Made Simple (2006)
- Snakewoman of Little Egypt (2010)
- The Confessions of Frances Godwin (2014)
- Love, Death & Rare Books (2020)
Collections
- The Truth About Death (2016)
Margot Harrington Book Covers
Novels Book Covers
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Robert Hellenga Books Overview
The Sixteen Pleasures
‘I was twenty nine years old when the Arno flooded its banks on Friday 4 November 1966. On Tuesday I decided to go to Italy, to offer my services as a humble book conservator, to save whatever could be saved, including myself.’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. For 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.
The Italian Lover
An exhilarating novel of romance, art, and food in Florence, featuring the beloved Margot Harrington, who graced Robert Hellenga’s The Sixteen Pleasures. Margot Harrington’s memoir about her discovery in Florence of a priceless masterwork of Renaissance erotica and the misguided love affair it inspired is now, 25 years later, being made into a movie. Margot, with the help of her lover, Woody, writes a script that she thinks will validate her life. Of course their script is not used, but never mind happy endings are the best endings for movies, as Margot eventually comes to see. At the former convent in Florence where ‘The Sixteen Pleasures’ now called ‘The Italian Lover,’ is being filmed, Margot enters into a drama she never imagined, where her ideas of home, love, art, and aging collide with the imperatives of commerce and the unknowability of other cultures and other people.
The Fall of a Sparrow
Robert Hellenga, bestselling author of The Sixteen Pleasures, once again reveals his profound understanding of the strength and resilience of the human spirit in a compelling and masterful novel. Alan Woodhull ‘Woody’, a classics professor at a small Midwestern college, finds himself convinced that life has taught him all the lessons he has to learn: After the tragic death of his beloved oldest daughter during a terrorist bombing in Italy seven years ago, his wife has left him and his two remaining daughters have grown up and moved away. Yet his decision to attend the trial of the terrorists and to return to the scene of the tragedy marks the beginning of a new life and the awakening of a new love.
Blues Lessons
Growing up on his family’s orchards in Appleton, Michigan, in the 1950s, Martin Dijksterhuis finds everything he needs in his extended family and in the land itself in the reassuring routines of growing and harvesting, spraying and pruning. Although his mother wants him to get out of Appleton, which she finds impossibly provincial, and attend a great university the University of Chicago, her alma mater he has no desire to leave. In the autumn of his junior year of high school, however, in the camp of the migrant workers who come north every year to pick the Dijksterhuis peaches and apples, Martin discovers his vocation, the country blues unsettling melodies that cry out from a place in the soul he never knew existed. He also falls in love with Corinna Williams, the strong willed daughter of the black foreman who runs the Dijksterhuis orchards. His blues vocation and his love for Corinna are the two stories of his life. His struggle to combine them into a single story takes him a long way from home and from the life he had always envisioned for himself, and then it brings him back again in a way he could never have imagined. In this beautifully rendered novel, Robert Hellenga, author of ‘The Sixteen Pleasures’ and ‘The Fall of a Sparrow,’ explores the fragility of happiness, the difficulties of following one’s calling in life, and the sorrows and satisfactions of being a parent.
Philosophy Made Simple
Rudy Harrington has spent half his life in a rambling Chicago house, raising three daughters with his independent minded wife. But his wife has died, his daughters have moved away, and Rudy is restless. In what he interprets as a moment of transcendent vision, he puts the family home up for sale and buys an avocado grove in Texas. While adapting to his new vocation, new home, and new friends, Rudy takes up a book Philosophy Made Simple and begins to struggle with Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Schopenhauer. His newly acquired wisdom is put to the test when he enlists the neighborhood elephant to preside over his daughter’s Hindu wedding and falls in love with the groom s mother. Hellenga brings back characters from his bestselling The Sixteen Pleasures and introduces many compelling new ones including the elephant, who paints in a novel that illuminates our deepest concerns: love and death, marriage and family, and the mysterious tug of beauty on the human heart.
Snakewoman of Little Egypt
On the morning of his fortieth birthday, anthropology professor Jackson Jones contemplates his future: Should he go back to Africa, where he did his fieldwork, and live with the Mbuti, or should he marry and settle down in the Midwest, where he now teaches?On the morning of her release from prison, Sunny, who grew up in a snake handling church in the Little Egypt region of Southern Illinois, rents a garage apartment from Jackson. She’s been serving a five year sentence for shooting, but not killing, her husband, the pastor of the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following after he forced her at gunpoint to put her arm in a box of rattlesnakes. Sunny and Jackson become lovers, but they’re pulled in different directions. Sunny, drawn to science and eager to put her snake handling past behind her, enrolls at the university. Jackson, however, takes a professional interest in the religious ecstasy exhibited by the snake handlers. Push comes to shove in a novel packed with wit, substance, and emotional depth. Snakewoman of Little Egypt delivers Robert Hellenga at the top of his form.
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