In this tender, dramatic novel, Sandra Sabatini explores the cost of war on the ordinary people who fought on different fronts: in the vast wasteland of North Africa, and in the green hills of Nazi-occupied Italy. Dante and Angelina, two young lovers who meet on the eve of Dante's deployment to North Africa, fight to survive the Second World War. While Dante becomes an accomplished mechanic, working on German fighter planes, Angelina contends with the presence of German soldiers in her own small town, and the evil that they introduce into her world. Apart, they must both find the strength to endure, and to stay alive in order to find each other again.
Praise for The Dolphins at Sainte-Marie:
“A wonderful collection. Sabatini's stories are superbly crafted, her characters vivid, their lives ultra-present and felt. Here are the fresh, piercing hurts and fast hardening revelations of growing up.” “Lisa Moore, Giller-prize finalist for Open and Alligator
“It's all here: an empathy with characters?a sly sense of humour?a sharp eye for the minutiae.??The Montreal Gazette

Sandra Sabatini's first collection of short stories, The One With the News (Porcupine's Quill, 2000), was shortlisted for the McClelland Stewart Writers Trust Journey and or the Upper Canada Writers` Craft Award. Sabatini's second book, Making Babies: Infants in Canadian Fiction (2004), explored how Canadian novelists wrote about babies over the course of the 20th century and how infants become more predominant, developing their own literary identity. Her second collection of short stories, The Dolphins at Sainte-Marie (Penguin, 2006), explores small town living in Southern Ontario and the curiosities of youth and inexperience. Her novel, Dante's War, was published in March 2009 with Key Porter and follows the lives of two Italian lovers during the Second World War. She is currently writing a novel about winter. Sabatini lives, works, and teaches in Guelph and is on the graduate faculty of the University of Guelph MFA program in Creative Writing.

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