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. Through the watchful young seamstress' eyes, this small Italian city and its residents emerge in all their vitality, vanity, and fragility—flawed yet congenial people who are not quite what they pretend to be. There is the Marchesa Esther, who rides horses and studies mechanics and ancient Greek; Miss Lily Rose, a spirited American journalist who commissions a special corset—with pockets to hide more than just her flaws; the Provera sisters with their expensive Parisian fashions that belie their financial hardships; and Assuntina, the wild child. There are men, young, old, and in between; love affairs and broken hearts; and even a murder (or was it suicide?). And at the center, watching and waiting is the seamstress herself, an intelligent, ambitious girl with a tender heart and her own impossible dream. An irresistible literary confection rich in atmosphere and period detail and packed with compelling characters. The Seamstress of Sardinia transports us to a long-ago world not so removed from our own—to a society rigidly divided by wealth and shaped by passion, hope, ambition, and love—the elemental forces that drive human lives.
Author
Bianca Pitzorno (Sassari, 1942) è una scrittrice, autrice televisiva e traduttrice italiana. Celebre soprattutto come autrice di romanzi per ragazzi, dal 2000 è anche ambasciatrice UNICEF. Born in 1942, she's an Italian writer and screenwriter specialized in children literature. She graduated in Classic Literature, with a thesis on Prehistoric Archeology. For seven years she worked as a responsible for cultural children’s television programmes for the Italian public television (RAI). She also worked as an archeologist, theatre writer, screenwriter, lyricist and teacher. From 1970 to 2011 she published many assays and novels, for both kids and adults, translated in many countries all over Europe, America and Asia. She translated Tolkien, Sylvia Plath, David Grossman, Enrique Perez Diaz, Töve Jansson, Soledad Cruz Guerra e Mariela Castro Espìn. She lives in Milan. She doesn’t love traveling but visits Cuba often and collaborates with the local cultural institutions. Since 2004 she stopped writing for younger readers, concentrating only on adult books. Her most popular works are: La bambina col falcone 1982; Vita di Eleonora d'Arborea, 1984 e 2010; Ascolta il mio cuore, 1991; Tornatras, 2000; La bambinaia francese, 2004; GIUNI RUSSO, da Un'Estate al Mare al Carmelo, 2009. La vita sessuale dei nostri antenati (spiegata a mia cugina Lauretta che vuol credersi nata per partenogenesi) 2015.
