After losing his beloved wife to a drunk driver, fifty-three year old Tom Walker retreats into dark clouds of depression, isolating himself from friends, family, and the things he loves. Gloomy days turn into years and just when it seems there will be no break in the clouds, a light appears, in the form of a dazzling young woman named Erika Stevens. Tom is old enough to be her father, but he refuses to let their chance encounter in a rain-soaked city parking lot go to waste, and as the two strangers move from public coffee dates to something more, they make a surprising Valentines Day pact friendship at all costs. But can men and women really be just friends? And is age really, as Erika says, just a number? Set in the vibrant (and famously rainy) city of Portland, Oregon, Tom and Erikas story serves as a potent reminder that even the seemingly endless storm clouds of life have breaks sun breaks that seem to come in the most unexpected places.

Written when the author was in his early and mid-twenties, Until the Sun Breaks Down is a contemporary American Künstlerroman modeled on Dante’s Divine Comedy. In three parts and one hundred chapters that mirror Dante’s classic poem, Nicolello takes the reader through present-day American towns and cities: infernal, purgatorial, and paradisal aspects with nothing left off the table. At once a book that can be read without any prior knowledge of Dante as the chronicle of William Fellows, child of a poverty-stricken single mother and precocious student dreaming of something better than what society offers, the book will serve as a guide to untold disconsolate Westerners who are wondering what has happened to American literature; where Catholic voices might emerge from, and how; and a bulwark against militant atheism by immersing the subject head-on and elucidating how to remove one’s self from technological desolation and recapture the essence of the Logos Incarnate, or the love that moves the sun and other stars.

Written when the author was in his early and mid-twenties, Until the Sun Breaks Down is a contemporary American Kunstlerroman modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy. In three parts and one hundred chapters that mirror Dante's classic poem, Nicolello takes the reader through present-day American towns and cities: infernal, purgatorial, and paradisal aspects with nothing left off the table. In the third and final volume, structurally modeled on Dante's Paradiso, the national themes of interior and exterior decline reach a head before anything like peace is found for anyone. For that matter, the text takes on an Augustinian turn: the City of Man vs. the City of God, with William Fellows coming to the end of the line of temporal pleasures and escapes, and even disillusionment with San Francisco, or the furthest end of western civilization. It is here that the character Octavia begins to take on the role of Beatrice, guiding William to safe passage--but not before hallucinatory episodes in both the city and the town, or San Francisco and Jerusalem.

************** THE FIFTEENTH CLIFFEHAVEN NOVEL BY SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR ELLIE DEAN Cliffehaven, June 1944 As the planes continue to circle over Cliffehaven, Peggy Reilly’s sister Doris must seek refuge after a V-1 blast destroys her home. Rita, Sarah and the other residents at Beach View Boarding House quickly find their peace disturbed and it’s not long before even Peggy loses her patience. But with more bad news to come, will Doris finally be forced to swallow her pride? Meanwhile Peggy’s father-in-law Ron Reilly is delighted when his sweetheart Rosie returns home. Until a heart-breaking confession suggests things may never be the same between them. With loved ones scattered far and wide across the globe, and tensions running high, the end of the war feels somehow further than ever. And yet with the long-awaited Allied invasion in sight, a glimmer of light is starting to break through... A fabulous, heart-warming Second World War novel in Ellie Dean's bestselling Cliffehaven series (previously called the Beach View Boarding House series).