Don Zancanella – Official website

Coming in 2024 from Delphinium/HarperCollins: ANIMALS OF THE ALPINE FRONT, a novel set in the Italian Alps during World War One, about an Italian girl trapped in the fortress city of Trento, an American boy pressed into service in the Austrian army, and the founding of Italy’s first animal welfare organization.

A Storm in the Stars:
A novel about Mary Shelley
—
her childhood, her passionate love affair with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, their radical politics and transformative art… and the writing of Frankenstein, a book that stunned the world.

“With A Storm in the Stars, Don Zancanella brings the high stakes lives of the Shelley couple to turbulent life. This is a moving account of the making of a writer – of two writers – and the high-achieving early nineteenth century community of which they were a part.”
—Fiona Sampson, author of In Search of Mary Shelley

“Don Zancanella breathes fresh life into the radical enchantment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Shelley—one of the great love stories of all time.”
—Samantha Silva, author of Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft

“A panoramic sweep through the lives and viewpoints of the Shelley circle, this compassionate novel is beautifully told.”
—Alix Hawley, author of All True Not a Lie In It

‘What a beguiling group of characters – Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Lord Byron, Keats. Misfits and creative spirits, they fought convention and sought to live authentic, genuine lives of meaning. This is an ambitious novel that succeeds magnificently in taking us into the minds and hearts of these fascinating, complicated, and brave individualists of the past, all of whom can inspire us in the present.”

—Elizabeth J. Church, author of The Atomic Weight of Love

“An elegant sojourn in the early 19th century inspired by the travels and travails of the Romantic poets Shelley and Lord Byron. The world of this novel especially brings Mary Shelley’s own brilliance to satisfying life.”

—Alix Christie, author of Gutenberg’s Apprentice.

“In A Storm In The Stars, Don Zancanella brings to vivid life a fascinating cast of characters. Today Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and their artistic and eccentric friends may seem larger than life names captured in stodgy English Literature textbooks. Zancanella renders them extraordinary and yet vitally real, down to earth, and so very, heartbreakingly, young.”

—Denise Giardina, author of Emily’s Ghost.