Calendar of Events

A reading and Q&A with author

Marianne Pantano Rutter ‘74

About the book
It is the fall of 1942 and Giampaolo Stagno is starving.  A soldier in the beleaguered Italian Army, the young Sicilian is captured and shipped from North Africa to the United States as a prisoner of war, assigned to a POW camp in New Jersey.
  
A hundred miles from the camp, in Pennsylvania, Eleanor Fazzio is also starving — for a different life.  She works in a textile mill and returns home each day to her mother and cousins and their close-knit Italian-American immigrant community.  War has limited the possibilities for a thirty-year-old woman in Eleanor’s corner of America, and she longs for another kind of life.

Giampaolo and Eleanor know nothing of each other, though they share the customs and dialect of their island homeland, Sicily.  Fate conspires to bring the couple together; their common heritage, shapedthousands of miles apart, forges a tentative bond between them.  But the vagaries of a world war and its aftermath drive them apart, thrusting the pair into an uncertain future.
 
About the author
A first-generation Sicilian-American, Marianne Rutter was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, into a large extended Italian family. She attended parochial schools in Berks County and was the first in her immediate family to graduate from high school. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Bryn Mawr College and moved to Boston, where she and her late husband raised two children and where she worked in publishing for forty years, retiring in 2017.

Marianne is an avid traveler and an accomplished home cook.  She shares family photos and recipes of dishes described in the book on her website:  www.mariannerutter.com
 
Home Elsewhere is her first novel.
 
Where to buy the book (Note: Familiarity with the book not required to enjoy the talk.)
Kindle edition: $8.99 or free to Kindle Unlimited members
https://tinyurl.com/HomeElsewhereEbook
Paperback: $16.99 – available from
Amazon.com: https://amzn.to/3TYCeVb
Bookshop.org: https://tinyurl.com/HomeElsewherePB
or request at your favorite brick-and-mortar bookshop (they can order from Ingrams)

The excerpt reading / Q&A will be about an hour.