The House of the Swallows
by Angela Ragusa
Kindle Published in 2023 by IFISS Press in English
Paperback Published in 2023 by IFISS Press in English
Translation by William Woolf

Avaiable as a Paperback book ($8.99) or as a Kindle ePub (4.99).

Ilaria is fourteen years old when a letter from a lawyer turns her little world upside down. Her father Max, who is struggling to make ends meet, is the only heir to the noble and rich house of the Barons of Sanvitale. Why did her father turn his back on his family, trying to erase their memory? Ilaria will find out only after moving with her father into the decayed noble residence of the Sanvitale's, the house of the swallows, which overlooks the sparkling blue Little Sea of Taranto. There, hidden in an old desk, she finds the diary of an aunt who she didn't know existed, Nella, her father's younger sister. Driven by her curiosity, she devours the pages of the diary, ever more determined to discover the fate of the young woman who many years before, during World War II, had confided her dreams and her pains on those pages. To her surprise, she finds an unsuspected ally who, she discovers, is an unknown cousin, the granddaughter of her grandfather's estranged brother. Together, the two girls decide to heal at all costs the abyss of resentment and blame created by the cruel lies of IIaria's grandfather, a man blinded by pride. It is during the culminating moment of the evocative Easter rites of Taranto, characterized by the slow pace of the barefoot hooded Perdùne, that the last painful secrets dividing their families for too long are finally revealed.