La Voglia

One night. Ten tables. Every secret.

Andrew McMurphy had a plan for everything. A one mile run at six every morning. A job designing medical equipment. A brand new BMW he had wanted since he was nineteen. What he did not have was anyone in the passenger seat, and he told himself that was fine.

Then a grain truck ran a stop sign.

After surgery, starving and strangely light on his feet, Andrew walks out of the hospital and across the street into a small Italian restaurant called La Voglia. He is sure he has never been there. He is just as sure he knows it. He takes a table for two by the window, orders a glass of terrible wine that tastes like a memory, and looks around at a room where every table is full.

That is when he starts to hear them.

Every whisper. Every buried thought. An old woman keeping a secret from her husband for forty nine years. A church deacon who once left a girl in a ditch and drove away. A young man whose life runs on a machine Andrew helped design. A father hiding a letter in his garage. And at the center table, a woman whose laugh Andrew would know through a wall.

One by one, their stories turn out to be tied to his own in ways he never imagined. And the waiter keeps coming back to ask if he is ready for the check.

Andrew keeps saying, not yet.

La Voglia is a warm, haunting novel about the secrets we carry, the people we leave at the table, and the love that waits for us anyway. For readers who love emotional fiction with an ending that sends them straight back to page one.