Readers looking for a sweeping romantic saga can download the ebook version of Gina Iafrate's award-winning novel, The English Professor, at no charge on October 19 and 20, 2026, the author has announced. The free promotion is available exclusively through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Gina-Iafrate/author/B00MRZ8Y9A.
The novel follows Andrew Robertson, an introverted, middle-aged professor who leaves his unremarkable London life for Sicily, where strangers welcome him kindly. In that sensuous Mediterranean setting, he develops a burning infatuation for another man's wife, Francesca. Their affair satisfies and heightens the emotional and physical longing they have felt all their adult lives and results in a child. But Andrew must return to London, and Francesca must protect herself, Andrew, and their child from the violent reach of her husband.
The English Professor is the first book in Iafrate's Strong Women series, which features characters who overcome staggering odds and emerge from overwhelming circumstances to build lives that can serve as models for women everywhere. The series continues with The Professor's Daughter, which follows Gracy Robertson, the love child of that intense affair. Taken at birth from her dying mother and left in the care of her devastated father, Gracy lives in hiding for years to avoid the corrupt mobsters who killed her mother. When the threat finally lifts, the pair believe peace can return to the place where the professor's passion led to Gracy's conception. Just as normalcy seems lasting, the professor's life journey ends, and a grief-stricken Gracy is challenged to overcome heartache and the fogginess of her empty world. Her destiny takes her across the ocean, where she finds love and affection, but fate strikes with people and difficult situations that threaten her peace of mind, her heart, and her life. Those threats are appeased only when her heart finds its home in her denied lover's devotion.
The third book, Love and Betrayal, continues Gracy's story. She believes she has found her true eternal love, but later in her married life the happiness turns disenchanting as her husband Alvaro's vows change. His unfaithfulness brings pain and suffering, and his behavior brings catastrophic consequences influenced by someone else's greed, jealousy, and revenge. Gracy's emotional journey of survival turns challenging, and in solitude and despair she is tested by waves of courage. With the intervention of caring people, she finally finds love, peace, and support once more until her terrestrial journey comes to an end.
Iafrate writes sweeping family sagas that allow readers to travel the globe without leaving home. Like fine pieces of music, her books are layered, providing intricately formed mental images punctuated by dramatic movements. In the tradition of writers like Nicholas Sparks and John Grisham, her story lines reveal the richness of the human experience told through finely drawn characters, and nearly all involve rich, tactile descriptions of exotic places that place the reader in the midst of those locales.
The Strong Women series also includes The Girl From The Cornfield, set in 1950 in a sleepy Italian mountain town, where Giuliana Ferrante's young life is rocked by a vicious attack; she flourishes by working toward her education, securing a legal degree and a successful business position, and conquers all with kindness and love. Bestowed By Love And Splendour tells of a broken-hearted wife and mother who finds the universal bliss takes her far across the ocean to the exotic island of Sardinia, where she is hypnotized by nature's beauty before fate strikes once more. Iafrate is also the author of Releases From My Soul, a collection of anthologies combining true stories, adventures, and experiences from her life with poems drawn from the depth of her soul. She is currently working on her seventh novel, The Shoeless Boy.
A resident of Niagara, Ontario, Iafrate has been featured in local publications such as the Niagara News. Her books are available at online retailers and traditional brick and mortar bookstores, and more information is available at her website at http://www.ginaiafrate.com. The free ebook offer gives new readers a low-risk entry point into a series built around resilient women, a theme the author has made central to her catalog.
