Booksmith and The Bindery are very pleased to host the virtual launch for Nicola DeRobertis-Theye and her debut novel The Vietri Project. She'll be joined in conversation by Hilary Leichter (Temporary).

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

You can order The Vietri Project here – we're currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.

About the book

Working at a bookstore in Berkeley in the years after college, Gabriele becomes intrigued by the orders of signor Vietri, a customer from Rome whose numerous purchases grow increasingly mystical and esoteric. Restless and uncertain of her future, Gabriele quits her job and, landing in Rome, decides to look up Vietri. Unable to locate him, she begins a quest to unearth the well-concealed facts of his life.

Following a trail of obituaries and military records, a memoir of life in a village forgotten by modernity, and the court records of a communist murder trial, Gabriele meets an eclectic assortment of the city’s inhabitants, from the widow of an Italian prisoner of war to members of a generation set adrift by the financial crisis. Each encounter draws her unexpectedly closer to her own painful past and complicated family history—an Italian mother diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized during her childhood, and an extended family in Rome still recovering from the losses and betrayals in their past. Through these voices and histories, Gabriele will discover what it means to be a person in the world; a member of a family and a citizen of a country—and how reconciling these stories may be the key to understanding her own.

About the authors

Nicola DeRobertis-Theye was an Emerging Writing Fellow at the New York Center for Fiction, and her work has been published in Agni, Electric Literature, and LitHub. A graduate of UC Berkeley, she received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, where she was the fiction editor of its literary magazine Ecotone. She is a native of Oakland, CA and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Hilary Leichter's novel Temporary was shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and longlisted for the Pen/Hemingway Award. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, n+1, Harper's, Conjunctions, and The New Yorker. She teaches at Columbia University.

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.