"As the heir to a proud Northern Italian ice-cream dynasty, Giovanni Talamini's family is none too happy when he decides to break with tradition and travel the world as a poet. So when Giovanni receives an unexpected call from his brother, he is faced with a difficult decision: return home to serve in his family's interests or continue on his own path in life once and for all?"--Provided by publisher.

Zusammenfassung
In this “moving story of how sacrifices accumulate in the wake of passions left unfulfilled” (Publishers Weekly)—perfect for fans of Fredrik Backman and Lisa Genova—a poet must decide if he should put his family’s or his own needs first when he returns to Italy help run the family business he left behind years ago.

As the heir to a proud Northern Italian ice-cream dynasty, Giovanni Talamini’s family is none too happy when he decides to break with tradition and travel the world as a poet. So when Giovanni receives an unexpected call from his brother, he is faced with a difficult decision: return home to serve in his family’s interests or continue on his own path in life once and for all?

In a heartwarming tale that weaves history with lore and poetry with delicious recipes, The Ice-Cream Makers paints a century-long, multigenerational portrait of a family wrestling with their identity and how to ensure their legacy. This is a “delightful read; smooth as ice cream on a hot summer day” (Kirkus Reviews).

Leseprobe
The Ice-Cream Makers

How My Father Lost His Heart to a Hammer Thrower Weighing One Hundred and Eighty-Three Pounds

SHORTLY BEFORE his eightieth birthday, my father fell in love. It was love at first sight; love like a bolt from the blue, like lightning striking a tree. My mother phones to tell me. “Beppi has lost his mind,” she says.

It happened during a live broadcast of the London Olympics. During the women’s hammer-throw final, to be precise. Since my father had a satellite dish installed on the roof, he’s had access to more than a thousand channels. He spends whole days in front of the television—a beautiful flat-screen—and presses the button of the remote control at a consistently high tempo. Soccer games from Japan, Arctic nature documentaries, Spanish art house films, and reports on disasters in El Salvador, Tajikistan, and Fiji flash past. And then there are the programs with women, of course: gorgeous, glorious women from all over the world. Buxom Brazilian hosts; near-naked Greek showgirls; news broadcasters whose bulletins, quite aside from the language (Macedonian? Slovenian?), are lost on him because of their full, glossy lips.

Usually there will only be some five or six seconds between the channels my father alights on. But sometimes he lingers, and spends a whole evening watching coverage of the Mexican elections or a documentary series about the tropical waters off Polynesia, green as a gem.

It was a Turkish sports channel that my father had stumbled across after pressing the button of the remote with his calloused thumb. The Egyptian soap that, in the space of five seconds, had homed in on just as many women’s melodramatic faces, had failed to beguile him. So Beppi pressed the button, which had once been black, then gray, and was now white, practically transparent. And that’s when he was struck by lightning. There on the screen was his princess: creamy white skin, coral-red hair, and the biceps of a butcher. She entered the circle in Olympic Stadium, grabbed the handle at the end of the chain, raised the ball over her left shoulder, and turned—one, two, three, four, five times—before hurling the iron ball with all the strength she could muster. Like a meteor having survived entry into the atmosphere, it buzzed and fizzed through the steel-blue skies of London. On impact, it left a brown hole in a meticulously cut lawn.

My father dropped his remote. The lid at the back came off, and one battery rolled across the wooden floor. The Turkish commentator was full of praise for the throw, but his singsong words were lost on my father. The repeat showed his broad-shouldered ballerina a second time. Her pirouette gathered speed and ended in a brief but surprisingly elegant curtsy.

He felt like he had been spinning around, too. Faster and faster. And now he was sitting here on his sofa, in love and in awe, as if he had been hit on the head by the nine-pound ball.

Her name was Betty Heidler, it turned out, and she was the world record holder, having broken it by 44 inches a year ago at an international competition in Halle, Germany. It had been a warm day in May with hardly any wind, sunglasses and short sleeves everywhere. With a spring in her step the athlete proceeded to the circle with the green nets, and almost casually threw the hammer an astronomical distance. It didn’t leave a crater but bounced a couple of times, like the pebbles children throw across the water of the nearby Lake Hufeisen. In between major competitions, she worked for the police force, wearing a dark blue uniform with four stars on both epaulettes, her red hair kept in a tight bun. Polizeihauptmeisterin Heidler.

In London, Betty Heidler threw a distance that was to earn her a bronze medal, but the measuring system malfunctioned, so her achievement couldn’t be determined right away. It took forty minutes before a decision was reached. These forty minutes were like a romantic film to my father. He swooned over the redheaded hammer thrower who kept appearing on-screen, sometimes close to tears. Her rival, the fleshy Chinese Zhang Wenxiu, had already embarked on a lap of honor, the red flag with the yellow stars wrapped around her broad shoulders.

“No! Not the ten-ton Chinese!” my father yelled.

The Turkish commentator was a bit more nuanced about it, but he too was of the opinion that Betty Heidler, not Zhang Wenxiu, deserved the bronze. Incidentally, the Chinese athlete really weighed only 249 pounds, but that was still a full 66 pounds more than the ginger hammer nymph.

“Get rid of the flag,” my father said. “You bloated old meatball!”

And when Betty Heidler appeared on-screen, “Don’t cry, my little princess. Don’t be sad, dear fleet-footed lady.”

It was an epitheton ornans he was using, unwittingly dug up from the past, going back thirty-five years, to the time I went to grammar school and to everybody’s shock started expressing myself in the colorful adjectives of the blind poet. According to my father, it sowed the seeds for the distance between me and the rest of my family. Or as he likes to put it, “That’s where it all went wrong.”

My epithets used to drive him mad: the long-maned girls I flirted with, the cloud-wrapped buildings my mother wasn’t fond of, the wine-purple cherry ice cream he made. And now he had used one himself for his creamy-armed hammer-thrower.

The broadcast switched to an advertisement for hair spray. A bride came into view sporting a hairdo that looked like it would stay in place for at least a week.

“Betty, come back!” my father shouted at the flat-screen, on which the spray was misted across the chestnut curls of the smiling bride in high definition and slow motion. His thumb moved of its own accord—the calloused old thumb, the thumb that for years had hooked itself around the metal handle of the spatolone, the large ladle with which the ice is scooped out of the cylinders of the Cattabriga.

“Oh, Betty,” my father sa…