Seamstress in Sardinia combines sewing and Italian women’s history in a way that fully captured my interest. The novel takes place in the late 1800s and early 1900s and revolves around a seamstress who relates the story of her life. Through her reminiscences, the reader gains an understanding of the strict parameters that governed women’s lives in that time and place.
Each chapter is a mini story of a different woman’s life as seen through the eyes of the seamstress as she tells her own story. The novel is based in historical fact. Modern readers may find it hard to understand how little freedom these women had.
Many readers today know little about Italian women’s true history. Stereotypes abound. This novel shows what life was really like. The story in Seamstress in Sardinia also unfolded all over rural southern Italy and in Sicily. It reflects what I learned from my immigrant Sicilian grandmother.
A bestselling Italian writer makes her American debut with this delightful dramedy of manners, family, romance, and fashion that is set on the island of Sardinia at the end of the nineteenth century—a dazzling and original literary blend of Jane Austen and Adriana Trigiani.
In 1900 Sardinia, a young woman’s remarkable talent with a needle earns her a position as a seamstress with a wealthy family. Inside this privileged world far different from her own humble beginnings, the skilled sewer quietly takes measurements, sketches designs, mends hems—and in the silence, hears whispered secrets and stories of all those around her.…
The Only One Left has a lot of twists and turns that kept me reading. I had checked out several reader reviews before picking up the book, and I was on high alert to look for clues as the story unfolded. I only guessed a few — a very few — and enjoyed every page and the surprises along the way. This is Gothic Suspense at its best. And it also shows you don’t need to include explicit sex or graphic violence to spice up a book. A great story wins every time. This one is a page-turner.
What a treasure. The Dry Wood is one of the best Catholic novels I've read. I consider it a lost classic. Written shortly after World War II ended, the story takes place during the war and is set in an underprivileged village in the English countryside. Characters' inner and outer journeys are revealed as the main storyline unfolds. Houselander weaves into the novel deep themes about the nature of love, belief, suffering, redemption, what it means to be Catholic, and more.
In the English-speaking world, the Catholic Literary Revival is typically associated with the work of G. K. Chesterton/Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. But in fact the Revival's most numerous members were women. While some of these women remain well known?Muriel Spark, Antonia White, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day?many have been almost entirely forgotten. They include: Enid Dinnis, Anna Hanson Dorsey, Alice Thomas Ellis, Eleanor Farjeon, Rumer Godden, Caroline Gordon, Clotilde Graves, Caryll Houselander, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Jane Lane, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Alice Meynell, Kathleen Raine, Pearl Mary Teresa Richards, Edith Sitwell, Gladys Bronwyn Stern, Josephine Ward, and Maisie Ward.
At Home in Persimmon Hollow is the first book in a series chronicling love and life in a small fictional town in frontier Florida.
In 1886, the devout Agnes is forced to leave - for her own safety - the Catholic convent-orphanage where she grew up. With nothing but her faith to sustain her, she begins her new life as a teacher in Persimmon Hollow. She discovers a wild and beautiful new landscape and a town filled with upright people. They include the difficult but handsome Seth, a man whose heart has been hardened to God after a terrible loss.
As Agnes starts to put down roots and establishes a fragile bond with Seth, danger strikes. Destructive men from both their pasts arrive in town. Will Agnes finally escape her past and embrace a bright new future?
