Novels To Read for Italian American Heritage Month
It's Italian American Heritage Month and we're highlighting fiction set within Italian American families and neighborhoods. These novels explore themes of identity, reinvention, assimilation, and cultural conflict especially through the lens of tight-knit immigrant enclaves and evolving family structures.
The Family
by Naomi Krupitsky
Pushing against the boundaries of society’s expectations and fighting to preserve their complex but life-sustaining friendship, Sofia Colicchio and Antonia Russo, who live in the shadow of their fathers’ unspoken community until Antonia’s father disappears, find their loyalty tested on one fateful night.
Hello Beautiful
by Ann Napolitano
Awarded a college basketball scholarship away from his childhood home silenced by tragedy, William Waters befriends the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano who welcomes him into her loving, loud, chaotic Italian American household in Chicago that includes three other sisters. But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters’ unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?
Varina Palladino's Jersey Italian Love Story
by Terri-Lynne DeFino
When her 92-year-old mother and daughter set in motion an ill-conceived plan to find her a man, widow Varina Paladino, running Paladino’s Italian Specialties grocery and keeping her large, loud Jersey Italian family from killing one another, doesn’t have time for love, but fate has other plans.
The Vietri Project
by Nicola DeRobertis-Theye
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.
Things That Happened Before the Earthquake
by Chiara Barzini
Transplanted from Rome to the San Fernando Valley by her hippie filmmaker parents, Eugenia struggles to navigate a new high school and makes two friends who introduce her to the counterculture scene before the 1994 earthquake puts their futures at risk.
Household Saints
by Francine Prose
On a 1950s September night so hot that the devout Catholics of Little Italy wonder if New York City has slipped into hell, the butcher Joseph Santangelo invites his friends to play pinochle. At the end of a long, sweaty, boozy evening, his friend Lino Falconetti, addled by wine and heat, bets the hand of his daughter, Catherine—and Santangelo wins. Santangelo’s modern new wife clashes immediately with his superstitious, fiercely protective mother. But years later, it is Catherine who is horrified when the daughter they raise turns out to have more in common with the old world than the new.
Umbertina
by Helen Barolini
This sweeping, multi-generational novel begins in southern Italy’s Calabria region in the late 1800s, as Umbertina—the wife of a simple farmer—persuades her husband to emigrate to the United States to pursue its promise of hope and freedom for their three children. Through years of struggle on New York City’s Lower East Side and then in a growing upstate New York town, it is Umbertina’s determination, ingenuity, and business sense that propel the family into financial success and security—leaving her daughters and granddaughters free to sort out their identities both as Italian Americans and as women.
The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna
by Juliet Grames
Believed cursed in her rugged Italian village, a tough, intelligent teen protects her younger sister when the family emigrates to America just before World War II, enduring challenges that transform her views about survival and independence.
The Godmothers
by Camille Aubray
Godmothers to one another's children, four women who married into a prosperous Italian family must come together, despite secrets and betrayals, when their husbands are forced to leave them during World War II, pitting them against notorious gangsters who run the streets of New York City.
All This Talk of Love
by Christopher Castellani
The American-born daughter of an immigrant plots to bring her entire family back to Santa Cecilia, Italy, so that her grandmother can make amends with her estranged sister who she hasn't seen in fifty years.
Hindsight
by Mindy Tarquini
Remembering all of her past lives, Eugenia, a sheltered early-thirties professor born this time around into a very traditional South Philadelphia Italian American family, finds herself seeking commonality with others who share her gift, finding that she must break the cycle in order to live the life of her dreams.
In Revere, In Those Days
by Roland Merullo
Anthony Benedetto, a young boy in a large extended Italian American family, describes growing up in the working-class community of Revere, Massachusetts, but his idyllic and charmed youth is changed forever by the tragic deaths of his parents, in a coming-of-age story.
An Italian Wife
by Ann Hood
An Italian immigrant watches her six children grow up while she searches for her seventh, the product of a love affair who was given up for adoption.
Christ in Concrete
by Pietro di Donato
An uncompromising yet beautiful portrait of the life of Italian immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1920s, Christ in Concrete is the story of a 12-year-old boy who must support his family after his father's untimely death.
You Were There Before My Eyes
by Maria Riva
A woman from a small, Italian village emigrates to America with her husband during the early part of the 20th century and must navigate a new language and country while dealing with the economic and social upheaval of an impending war.
Boys from Eighth and Carpenter
by Tom Mendicino
Tells the story of Frankie and Michael Gagliano, two brothers growing up in South Philadelphia, who promise on their mother's death bed to take care of each other, a promise which eventually forces one of them to choose between a comfortable life and a sacred oath.
Kiss Carlo
by Adriana Trigiani
Establishing a stable home and Western Union Telegraph Office in post-World War II Philadelphia, the hardworking Palazzini family is shattered by their nephew's epiphany in the wake of a telegram that changes everything for the citizens of a small Italian American village.
How Fires End
by Marco Rafalà
When his twin brothers are killed playing with an unexploded mortar shell in the Sicilian hillside in the summer of 1943, Salvatore’s faith is destroyed. He accepts the help of an Italian soldier with fascist ties who ushers him and his sister, Nella, into a new beginning in Middletown, Connecticut. The three struggle to build new lives for themselves and a dangerous choice to keep their secrets hidden erupts in violence decades later.
Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.