Openwork: A Novel - Tapa dura

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.

ADRIA BERNARDI is the author of In the Gathering Woods, a story collection awarded the 2000 Drue Heinz Prize. Her novel, The Day Laid on the Altar, won the Bakeless Fiction Prize. She is also a translator (of works from Italian) and essayist, and teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers near Asheville, North Carolina. She grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago, not far from Highwood - the immigrant community where her grandparents first settled. She now lives in Worcester, Massachusetts, with her husband and two sons.