A WINTER IN NEW YORK is a poignant and heartwarming Christmas tale by Josie Silver, author of ONE NIGHT ON THE ISLAND and ONE DAY IN DECEMBER. Grieving her mother and fleeing an abusive relationship, Iris leaves her budding career as a chef in London and travels to New York, based only on stories her mother told and movies they watched. Always on the outside of families looking in, she discovers a gelato parlor in Little Italy reminiscent of a photo of an unknown man who was her mother’s only love.
Iris learns the Belotti family patriarch, the only one who knows the family secret recipe, had a medical emergency causing him to lose memories including the gelato recipe. Iris decides to help widower Gio try to reconstruct the recipe while hiding the fact that Gio’s uncle gave the secret recipe to her mother years ago. As love blooms, Iris has to balance the secrets about herself and her mother’s connection to the family and the shadows of her past.
I must admit that any story revolving around food has me salivating and I loved the secondary characters. A WINTER IN NEW YORK is a sweet love story of two people who have known soul-crushing loss.
A young chef stumbles on a secret family recipe that might lead her to the love—and life—she’s been looking for in this stunning novel.
When Iris decides to move to New York to restart her life, she realizes she underestimated how big the Big Apple really is—all the nostalgic movies set in New York she’d watched with her mom while eating their special secret-recipe gelato didn’t quite do it justice.
But Bobby, Iris’s best friend, isn’t about to let her hide away. He drags her to a famous autumn street fair in Little Italy, and as they walk through the food stalls, a little family-run gelateria catches her eye—could it be the same shop that’s in an old photo of her mother’s?
Curious, Iris returns the next day and meets the handsome Gio, who tells her that the shop is in danger of closing. His uncle, sole keeper of their family’s gelato recipe, is in a coma, so they can’t make more. When Iris samples the last remaining batch, she realizes that their gelato and her gelato are one and the same. But how can she tell them she knows their secret recipe when she’s not sure why Gio’s uncle gave it to her mother in the first place?
Iris offers her services as a chef to help them re-create the flavor and finds herself falling for Gio and his family. But when Gio’s uncle finally wakes up, all of the secrets Iris has been keeping threaten to ruin the new life—and new love—she’s been building all winter long.