Why read Casa Rossa?

Book cover of Casa Rossa

Book description

This second novel by the author of the acclaimed Rules of the Wild is very much in the tradition of The Leopard or The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a compelling story of three generations in twentieth-century Italy. Casa Rossa, the home of the Strada family, is a magnificent farmhouse standing…

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Literary fiction

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Why read it?

1 author picked Casa Rossa as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Cheryl A. Ossola

Author

This book made me fall in love with Puglia, the hot, dusty “heel of the boot” with its lemons, olives, and cactus, its boxy farmhouses. Not that the story, bouncing from Paris to New York to a long-gone Rome, doesn’t deliver—the narrator, Alina, talks about a family secret passed from woman to woman, disintegrating memories, a past she must understand before the movers arrive and the house with its mural of a naked woman painted on a patio wall is no longer theirs. Present and past, the known and the unknown combine, and all of it is tied to…

From Cheryl's list on The best novels about people grappling with the past (often sabotaging their present and future in the process).