Brought up by his tricky but charismatic grandfather in a tiny Italian village, Pistola has married Teresa, the tempestuous beauty he's loved since childhood. They've left their close-knit community where all that matters is what you're having for dinner, and moved to South Africa to open a restaurant. It's Pistola's lifelong dream. But it's proving problematic. Though they're both great cooks they've never run a restaurant. Nor can they understand the peculiar apartheid laws that ban certain people from eating there. To make matters worse, vast unseen forces combine to draw Pistola back home away from his beloved. An unexpected series of perilous encounters follow, threatening his marriage and stretching his courage to the limit. Nostalgic and humorous by turns, the Pistola chronicles are stand-alone novels based on a little-known episode in South Africa in the fifties when many of the 110 young Italian men recruited to work as train stewards ended up opening restaurants that gave Italian food to the nation.