Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his subdued life greatly disturbed when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation. Dominick is forced to care for his brother as well as confront dark secrets and pain he has buried deep within himself-a journey of the soul that takes him beyond his blue-collar New England town to Sicily's Mount Etna,...

In this stunning debut novel, a young woman tells the story behind two elderly sisters' estrangement, unraveling family secrets stretching back a century and across the Atlantic to early 20th century ItalyFor Stella Fortuna, death has always been a part of life. Stella's childhood is full of strange, life-threatening incidents--moments where ordinary situations like cooking eggplant or feeding the pigs inexplicably take lethal turns. Even Stella's...