J.  I have a passion for 'first books'.  Not that authors don't improve as they publish more, but it seems all their enthusiasm, expectation, energy is released in that first novel.
So here are two firsts that I have read and re-read many times...and loved every second of it.

if you spend most of your life alone you do not know that you are lonely....

A shimmering first novel of self-discovery, of redemption from numb solitude, and of the matchless consolations to be found in human connection and spiritual nourishment, Miss Garnet's Angel limns—with uncommon subtlety and an engaging, often subversive wit—the thematic parallels and intersections that bind an ancient tale from the Apocrypha to a modern-day narrative about a retired British spinster on sojourn in Venice. A word-of-mouth bestseller and a critics' favorite on both sides of the Atlantic, Salley Vickers' resonant debut achieves something that has become all too rare in recent years: a wholesale blurring of the line distinguishing the "popular" from the "literary" on today's fiction shelves.   Daniel Eshom.

He saw her across the Piazza San Marco and fell in love from afar. When he sees her again in a Venice café a year later, he knows it is fate. He knows little English; and she, a divorced American chef, speaks only food-based Italian. Marlena thinks she is incapable of intimacy, that her heart has lost its capacity for romantic love. But within months of their first meeting, she has packed up her house in St. Louis to marry Fernando—"the stranger," as she calls him—and live in that achingly lovely city in which they met.

Enjoy!