Featured Author Joe Novella Published Titles Pepe and Poppy Pepe and Poppy It's nineteen eighty-three and in Melbourne the worlds of Avondale Heights and Coburg are about to collide. Giuseppe Allevoni, from good Italian stock, has fallen in love with Kaliopi Papadolpoulos, a good Greek girl. When Pepe and Poppy announce to their families that they intend to get married, they set a culture clash in motion that, while at times comical, threatens to tear the lovers apart. Set against the backdrop of eighties fashion in a world of discos, home-grown tomatoes and pissing angel fountains, Pepe and Poppy is a charming romantic comedy about love and acceptance and discovering the universal similarities between us all. Joe Novella Joe was born 1967 in Victoria, to Southern Italian parents who had migrated from Calabria in the 1940's. As a child Joe was a sports nut, playing soccer from the age of six, loved to read, watch documentaries and daydream. Joe lists Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, a book he read at age fourteen, as a favourite. In 1987, Joe graduated with a bachelors degree in applied science (computing). Shortly after he began his love affair with travel, moving through the North American continent and then Europe, drove around Australia - sailed, walked or rode in places such as Kathmandu, Fiji, Bali, Thailand, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, India, Mexico and the Carribean.Joe's love of travel, sport and life in general, has its source in his single most defining characteristic - his love of people, as reflected in this, his first novel, Pepe and Poppy - the seeds for which having been sewn in the back-streets of Avondale Heights many years ago.