The Seamstress of Sardinia
A Novel
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- € 13,99
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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’s 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.
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Pitzorno's sparkling English-language debut follows a poor Sardinian orphan girl's coming-of-age as she becomes a seamstress, opera lover, and independent young woman. At five, in 1900, the unnamed narrator loses her parents in a cholera epidemic. She's taken in by her grandmother, Nonna, a seamstress who teaches her to sew. By age seven, the girl is helping with the work, and well-to-do brides teach her to read and offer her novels, periodicals, and opera libretti in exchange for sewing their trousseaux and layettes. Nonna dies when the narrator is 16, and she manages to sidestep the pitfalls awaiting young women of the lower classes thanks to her sewing skills and literacy. Though finding work is sometimes a struggle, she survives the lean times with her dignity intact and catches operas from the nosebleed seats. Independent women—including a bicycle-riding American journalist and the beneficent, globe-trotting Marchesina Ester—provide moral and financial support. A tantalizing suitor appears, but the narrator's problems are resolved more through courage, self-sacrifice, and honesty than through love or money. Minutely described period clothing and memorable characters conveyed via Maher's seamless translation add to the charm. This sumptuous costume drama has a great deal of heart.
