A COUNTRY OF PAPER

Laura Benedetti
, New Academia Publishing/THESPRING 2022
278 pages
ISBN 979-8-9852214-5-9 paperback
See an excerpt from the book.

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About the Author

Laura Benedetti is the Laura and Gaetano De Sole Professor of Contemporary Italian Culture at Georgetown University. The author of numerous volumes and essays that cover seven hundred years of Italian literature, from Dante to Elena Ferrante, she was awarded the Flaiano International Prize for her monograph The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in 20th-Century Italy, and has received grants and fellowships from the Renaissance Society of America, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. A Country of Paper is her first novel, followed by Secondo Piano (Second Story).

A COUNTRY OF PAPER

A Country of Paper spans two countries (the United States and Italy), three generations of women (Alice, her daughter Jane and her granddaughter Sara), and more than sixty years, from World War II to 2011. It tackles issues of cultural identity, family ties, displacement, and loss as it follows Sara in her journey to L’Aquila, Italy, to fulfill her grandmother’s last wish. Her personal quest intersects with the town’s struggle to recover from the disastrous 2009 earthquake, as Sara painfully uncovers her family’s history while trying to find her bearings in a devastated urban landscape.