THE SEVEN OR EIGHT DEATHS OF STELLA FORTUNA

Hundred-year-old Stella Fortuna sits alone in her house in Wethersfield, Connecticut, crocheting blankets and angrily ignoring her sister, Tina, who lives across the street. The sisters, once the best of friends, have not spoken for thirty years, not since The Accident -- the eighth time Stella nearly died. But what unspeakable betrayal made Stella turn on her sister? Born in a mountaintop village in southern Italy, Stella and Tina had grown up in abject poverty in the years between the two World Wars, abandoned by their father, who had left to seek his fortune in L'America, and forced to drop out of school after first grade to work in the olive groves. Tough, vivacious, and fiercely loyal, the inseparable sisters were foils for each other, Stella precocious and charismatic, Tina obedient and hard-working. But as Stella suffered ever more serious near-death experiences -- beginning in their childhood with the time she was burned by frying oil (“the eggplant attack”) -- the girls' beloved mother, Assunta, became convinced her eldest daughter was cursed, a victim of the Evil Eye or a malevolent ghost. But what was really trying to kill Stella Fortuna, eight (or maybe seven) different times? Now, after a century of trauma, Stella has turned on those who she once thought loved her most. It is up to the family historian to unravel the life and deaths of Stella Fortuna and to connect the inexplicable dots in her dramatic story -- to suggest, finally, a redemption of the battle-scarred and misunderstood woman known now to the family as “crazy Stella.”

An immigrant saga, a ghost story, and a coming-of cranky-old-age, Juliet Grames's THE SEVEN OR EIGHT DEATHS OF STELLA FORTUNA lays bare the costs of migration and the iron fist of the patriarchy -- but also of the love and devotion that can sustain a family through its generations.

Juliet Grames is Associate Publisher at Soho Press, where she also acquires and edits the critically acclaimed Soho Crime imprint. She has written for Words Without Borders and Anderbro, which published her story “Monologue,” winner of the Glass Woman Prize, runner-up for the OpenCity Trophy, and storySouth Million Writers Notable Story. She was born outside Hartford, Connecticut, into a tight-knit Italian-American family.

A Sarah Burnes Book for the Gernert Agency.

DIE SIEBEN ODER ACHT LEBEN DER STELLA FORTUNA
Deutsch von Werner Loecher-Lawrence
[HC Droemer ; Audio Argon 09/19; TB (neuer Umschlag) 11/2020]