LA FORTUNA

A character who is a fighter ; a lively tableau of rural Sicily at the end of the 19th centur y; the little-known story of the «Italo-Tunisians» who, contrary to today, made the inverse journey from Europe to North Africa (more than 100,000 settled in Tunisia)

«I wanted to bring to life the age-old story of immigration through one emblematic family--my own.» Françoise Gallo.

1901, Porto Empedocle, Agrigente Province. Giuseppa La Fortuna boards a boat crowded with her sons, discovered in extremis by her husband, Francesco. Like so many Sicilians, Giuseppa chose to leave Sicily for a new life in Tunisia. Some had fled cholera, abject poverty, or the racketeering of the local Mafia. For her part, Giuseppa wanted to save her husband and children from her despicable in-laws. During the crossing, she retraces her story. Abandoned on the doorstep of a convent at the age of three months, raised by strict nuns, when she found love with Francesco, she thought she'd at last escaped her fate of a beaten animal. But Francesco had the misfortune to have been born into a family of venal, stupid, and cruel small rural landowners. In vivid and simple style, Giuseppa recounts how she'd always managed, whatever the cost, to grab life by the scruff of the neck to attain her goal, guided by her unusual name, Giuseppa La Fortuna--Lucky Giuseppa.

Françoise Gallo, born in Tunisia to a Sicilian family, emigrated to the south of France with her family at the age of eight. She wrote and produced many documentaries (Sciascia, Suarès, Sempé, Puccini). In 2007, she penned the 52-minute Stessa Luna («Under the Same Moon»), winner of the 2007 Prix Scam and the point of departure for this novel inspired by her own family. Françoise Gallo now shares her time between Aix-en-Provence and Paris. La Fortuna is her first novel.