An Italian Wife

by Ann Hood

Overview

From the bestselling author of The Obituary Writer comes the stirring multigenerational story of an Italian family.

An Italian Wife opens in turn-of-the-century Italy,
when young Josephine Rimaldi is forced to follow her new husband to America in an arranged marriage and finds herself in a strange country with a man she doesn’t know or love.

Bound by tradition, she gives birth to seven children;
the last, conceived in a passionate affair, Josephine must give up for adoption. Josephine spends the rest of her life searching for this child,
keeping her secret even as her other children, whose stories unfold in surprising ways, go off to war, get married, and make their own mistakes: Her son suffers in World War I. Her daughter struggles to assimilate in the new world of the 1950s American suburbs. And her granddaughters experiment with the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the 1970s.

Poignant, sensual, and deeply felt,
An Italian Wife is a sweeping and evocative portrait of a family bound by love and heartbreak.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781483021676
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	09/02/2014
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ann Hood is the author of a dozen books of memoir and fiction, including the best-selling novels The Book That Matters Most and The Knitting Circle, and editor of the anthologies Knitting Yarns and Knitting Pearls. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and New York.

Editorial Reviews

06/16/2014
Hood (The Obituary Writer) crafts a stark tale of loss and longing with story of one woman’s life in Italy and America. Wed at 15 to an ambitious landowner 11 years her senior, Josephine Rimaldi emigrates to Rhode Island. Trapped in a loveless marriage, she takes comfort in what’s most familiar: too many children, iron-clad tradition, and a demanding church. The only passion Josephine finds is an affair that ends with an infant daughter given up for adoption, a loss that haunts both her and her lover. With heartbreaking regularity, each succeeding generation yearns for a better life but surrenders to disappointment: Josephine’s son Carmine, whose stint in WWII leaves him shell-shocked and adrift; widowed granddaughter Francie, who’s shunned by suburban wives and wooed by their husbands; the granddaughter that Josephine never knew, love-starved Penny, whose relationship with her mother, Martha, falls victim to an obsessive search for Josephine; and dreamer great-granddaughter Aida, who runs away from her family to a vague, unsettled future. On her 100th birthday, Josephine does not embrace the children and life she nurtured, but the “things we did not have, the love that broke our hearts, the child we lost…” (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"A big, full-hearted grazie to Ann Hood…. She has given us a feast of a story: impressive in its range, sumptuous in its evocations of love and loss, and deeply satisfying."

Christopher Castellani

"I loved Ann Hood's An Italian Wife in the same way I loved Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge—and for the same reason. The interconnected stories that fan out from a central character—in this case, matriarch Josephine Rimaldi—illuminate important truths about the ways in which our families, our ancestry, and the era into which we're born shape who we become. An Italian Wife is a multi-generational masterpiece."

Wally Lamb

"Glorious…Reading this novel was like taking a luscious train ride through the last century. …Full of surprise and wonder, the writing is at turns poetic and sensitive, then dynamic and wise. Ann Hood is a master craftsman. This resplendent novel is a grand crescendo in a pitch-perfect career."

Adriana Trigiani

"Is there anyone who can write about the connections between ordinary people as well as Ann Hood does?"

Jodi Picoult

"Hood reinvents the family saga into something spellbindingly new and authentically alive….From turn-of-the-century Italy to 1950s American suburbia to the psychedelic 1970s, Hood shows how love and history transform a family, fuel—and sometimes kill—their dreams, and connect them in ways they never might imagine. Sweeping, sensual, and downright astonishing."

Caroline Leavitt

2014-07-17
A century in the life of an extended Italian-American family. Hood's collection of linked stories begins in a small Italian village with Josephine, just 14. Suddenly married by family arrangement to pig-nosed, portly Vincenzo Rimaldi, she suffers a rude wedding night, but when Vincenzo leaves for America, she reverts back to childhood for nine more years, running barefoot in the Campanian hills—until her husband sends for her ("Salute"). Vincenzo works in a mill, and Josephine, a toil-worn housewife in an Italian Rhode Island neighborhood, bears seven children. The last of these is Valentina, the product of an all-too-brief interlude with a blond iceman. Telling Vincenzo the baby died in the hospital, Josephine gives Valentina up for adoption but never stops searching for her ("The Summer of Ice"). Sex and sexual mores are a major throughline. Josephine's son Carmine, shellshocked in World War I, finds peace only by masturbating to memories of a young Russian war widow he met in Coney Island ("Coney Island Dreams"). Lovely Josephine and her daughter Elisabetta, who wants to be a scientist, are preyed upon by the handsome parish priest, Father Leone, who partially atones by doing favors for the family, such as arranging the above adoption ("War Prayers"). Grandchild Francesca is both repelled and charmed when the community sends their meager riches to Mussolini. Her ticket out of Little Italy could be a blond boy in a fast car ("Dear Mussolini"). Later, we see her, a World War II widow, striving for social acceptance in a mostly Protestant subdivision, which, paradoxically, she achieves only by becoming the neighborhood homewrecker ("Husbands"). In the '70s, great-grandchild Aida longs to lead a Rat Pack lifestyle in Las Vegas like her cousin Cammie ("Crooning with Dino") and later escapes to San Francisco ("The Boy on the Bus"). Spot-on pop-culture references telegraph time and place. A few stories are marred by overly gimmicky endings, but the last two, about missed connections, are freighted with pathos. A soulful and multilayered book from this accomplished author.

Kirkus Reviews