Publisher's Synopsis
A search for an elusive customer leads a young bookseller to research the complicated history of her family in Rome and how it was shaped by mental illness, a communist murder trial, and devastating wartime losses. Working at a bookstore in Berkeley, Gabriele becomes intrigued by the orders of signor Vietri, a customer from Rome whose numerous purchases grow increasingly mystical and esoteric. She quits her job and, landing in Rome, decides to look up Vietri. 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. 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
