The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani

It is strapping young Ciro, now mostly grown, who is sent up the mountain to dig a grave for Enza’s beloved little sister Stella, who suddenly sickened and died, as people did in the time before antibiotics.

It is Enza’s father who drives the cart that carries Signora Lazzari away from her sons to wherever she is going. Meanwhile, on another part of the mountain (we are in northern Italy, near Bergamo, just before the turn of the 20th century), a girl named Enza is growing up in the bosom of a happy family, if one of straitened means, and the novel makes no secret of the fact that Enza and Ciro’s lives are entwined from the start. Ciro is not a saint (though Eduardo comes close), but he works hard and is watched over and helped along by a small host of flesh-and-blood angels. The nuns of San Nicola are not the same as a mother, but they provide a safe, trustworthy home for the boys. She is a warm-hearted writer with an optimistic and generous view of fortune and mankind, and this novel, based in part on stories told by Trigiani’s grandmother about how she came to America and made her way, is from the start a love story that involves many kinds of love.

But Adriana Trigiani is not in the business of creating worlds filled with misery and people you don’t want to know. When a novel begins with a distraught widow leaving her small sons at a convent, promising to return but instead disappearing without explanation for decades, you could reasonably assume there are grim times ahead for young Ciro Lazzari and his older brother Eduardo.

The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani