The Jukebox Queen Of Malta

A breathtaking and gloriously vivid novel about men and women at war in the spirit of Catch 22 and Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

'Under the heat and the hammering of bombs, Rinaldi paints the essence of the Second World War in exciting miniature'

'Much to enjoy...Rinaldi has tremendous fun evoking the rich cultural pudding that was Malta in 1942, its weird combination of superstition, fatalism and grafted-on anglophilia, of ricotta and stiff upper lip'

'Funny, romantic, disturbing...A marvellous tapestry of war...Moving and satisfying'

'A beguiling, romantic story in an illuminating and surprising setting'

Nicholas Rinaldi teaches at Fairfield University, in Connecticut, where he lives with his wife, Jackie.  His work includes two novels, Bridge Fall Down and The Jukebox Queen of Malta, and three collections of poetry: The Resurrection of the Snails, The Luftwaffe in Chaos and We Have Lost Our Fathers.

It is 1942 and the island of Malta is under siege by the dominant German air force. Out of the smoke and magnesium glare of bomb blast steps Rocco Raven, native of Brooklyn, New York, apprentice radioman and expert secondhand car dealer. His only contact is an American secret serviceman, Fingerley, whose rank upgrades with their every meeting and whose purpose is known to no-one but himself. Far from finding a role for Rocco, Fingerley leaves him to face the chaos alone. On only his second day there, his billet, on the top floor of a brothel, is blown to pieces. Without contacts or belongings, Rocco is left to wander the devastated streets of Valetta in a bewildered daze until he sees an apparition, a beautiful, ethereal woman. She is Melita, the Jukebox Queen of Malta, who spends her time delivering the jukeboxes wrought by her cousin from old automobile and gramophone parts to the bars and restaurants which must accommodate the beleagured civilian and military populations. It is the beginning of an extraordinary relationship that is at once passionate and guarded, which flourishes as the island's fortunes decline. Under the threat of starvation and in a world populated by the eccentrics of war, Rocco's seems to be the lone voice of sanity, until he too is affected by the madness around him and succumbs to the voluntary thrill of danger... 
The Jukebox Queen of Malta is an extraordinary novel of passion and intrigue set in a world which seems perilously balanced between what is real and what is not. It is a magnificently evocative piece of storytelling, where the bizarre and heady atmosphere of a society under siege masks the uneasy truce between the Allied occupiers and the Maltese natives, and where the physical beauty is only tainted by the sense of mystery desecrated.

Nicholas Rinaldi

'In a city with eight million stories, this is one worth picking up'

'A rich, ambitious book ... Rinaldi conjures a cosmopolitan New York that is violent and tender'

'Memorable ... richly textured ...paints a complex, compelling portrait of the ways we flirt with the American Dream'

'Geography is destiny in Nicholas Rinaldi's sprawling, elegant study.... [The] characters' histories collide with real world events and with one another'

Within the walls of Echo Terrace, the world... 
 
Farro Fescu is the concierge of Echo Terrace, an apartment block in New York City. Passing through his lobby at all hours of the night and day is an exotic cross-section of the world's population: An Egyptian born plastic surgeon who lives on the fifth floor and specialises in gender reassignment; a fighter pilot, on the eighth floor, who flew for Nazi Germany during WWII; an Iraqi spice merchant and the world-famous crazy-patch quilter with whom he's having an affair; and the young widow whose apartment is a jungle Eden filled with a menagerie of specimens - finches, canaries, a defanged cobra, and a monkey named Joe - that had been the subject of her dead husband's research. 
Fescu knows them all, knows all their secrets. He is keenly attuned to the building and the people in it, yet he does not know what is in his own heart - why, after a long, hard life, he is still alive, and still alone. Nor does he know of what he will be capable in the face of sudden, overwhelming tragedy...

Nicholas Rinaldi

Praise for Between Two Rivers

'In a city with eight million stories, this is one worth picking up'

'A rich, ambitious book ... Rinaldi conjures a cosmopolitan New York that is violent and tender'

'Memorable ... richly textured ...paints a complex, compelling portrait of the ways we flirt with the American Dream'

'In a city with eight million stories, this is one worth picking up'

'A rich, ambitious book ... Rinaldi conjures a cosmopolitan New York that is violent and tender'

'Memorable ... richly textured ...paints a complex, compelling portrait of the ways we flirt with the American Dream'

'In a city with eight million stories, this is one worth picking up'

'A rich, ambitious book ... Rinaldi conjures a cosmopolitan New York that is violent and tender'

'Memorable ... richly textured ...paints a complex, compelling portrait of the ways we flirt with the American Dream'

Books by Nicholas Rinaldi

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