Böcker av Don Zancanella

From a remote village between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire unrolls the intimate story of Teresa and Carlo, two young people whose paths cross and recross as they are first impelled by parents, then forced by sweeping world events to leave their childhood homes for lives they never imagined.Having left her mother and cherished dog Allucio, in Ulfano, Teresa works as a domestic servant in a large villa in Trento. She survives the Great War in the occupied city by banding together in a makeshift family with the other servants of the owners who have fled to escape the occupation. Carlo, an American still new to Italy and who speaks barely passable Italian, is just finding his footing in Trento when he’s dragged from bed at his boarding school, along with his classmates, and conscripted by the invading Austrian army. In a comical twist of fate, Carlo’s childhood near the Colorado gold mines motivates his captors to place him with a company of miners tasked with digging entrenchments and bunkers and building a massive fortress out of stone and ice, even as blizzards rage and artillery shells fall from the sky. Out of sheer loneliness, Carlo writes letters to Teresa, the girl he met only once in Trento. After the war, Carlo returns to Trento and reconnects with Teresa. Times are unsettled, as soldiers and those who fled the war flood back to the city and signs of the impending Influenza epidemic appear. With so much chaos, tradition gives way to new ideas, so neither worries about the consequences of their growing attachment. However, the same independence that has them dreaming of a future that didn’t exist when they were children, may pull them apart forever.

CONCORD tells the story of a single remarkable year when Henry David Thoreau and his brother John fall in love with the same girl; reclusive writer Nathaniel Hawthorne courts Sophia Peabody of the esteemed Peabody family; and the brilliant Margaret Fuller becomes a houseguest of the equally brilliant but married Ralph Waldo Emerson and finds herself engaged in a passionate affair of the mind as well as the heart. Today, these figures are icons of American literature but once they were young and in love.