Nicola DeRobertis-Theye and Ruchika Tomar, both 2015 Emerging Writer Fellows, reunited to celebrate the release of DeRobertis-Theye’s debut novel. The Vietri Project follows a Berkeley bookseller who finds herself thrust into Rome society during an investigation into a mysterious foreign customer’s life and history.
Tomar’s A Prayer for Travelers received the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction and was longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize in 2019.
Featured Book
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The Vietri Project
By Nicol DeRobertis-Theye
Published by HarperCollins
Working at a bookstore in Berkeley in the years after college, Gabriele becomes intrigued by the orders of signor Vietri, a customer from Rome whose numerous purchases grow increasingly mystical and esoteric. Restless and uncertain of her future, Gabriele quits her job and, landing in Rome, decides to look up Vietri. Unable to locate him, she begins a quest to unearth the well-concealed facts of his life.
Following a trail of obituaries and military records, a memoir of life in a village forgotten by modernity, and the court records of a communist murder trial, Gabriele meets an eclectic assortment of the city’s inhabitants, from the widow of an Italian prisoner of war to members of a generation set adrift by the financial crisis. Each encounter draws her unexpectedly closer to her own painful past and complicated family history—an Italian mother diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized during her childhood, and an extended family in Rome still recovering from the losses and betrayals in their past. Through these voices and histories, Gabriele will discover what it means to be a person in the world; a member of a family and a citizen of a country—and how reconciling these stories may be the key to understanding her own.
