Openwork — Adria Bernardi

In hauntingly evocative prose, Adria Bernardi creates a finely stitched fabric depicting the intertwined lives of three generations of closely related Italian families. At the novel's beginning, Imola Bartolai's lucid, yet troubled voice speaks from a mountain village on the border of Tuscany in northern Italy where she lives a hard life close to the land with her wandering husband and three children. Her favorite brother, Egidio, seeks a better life in America in the coal mines of Dawson, New Mexico. When Egidio's quiet voice is silenced by a horrific accident, the voice of his childhood friend and traveling companion, Antenore Gimorri, passionately urges their fellow workers to join the struggle for labor rights. As a stonemason, Gimorri raises three sons in the Chicago area, and it is his granddaughter, Adele, fully assimilated into American life, who closes the circle, traveling to Italy in search of her family's roots. In the novel's final section, her voice imaginatively joins Imola's as the two women, separated in time by a hundred years, find that there are many threads that bind them.