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"Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels meet Alice Munro's
Lives of Girls and Women" in award-winning author Connie Guzzo-McParland's highly anticipated sophomore novel,
The Women of SaturnThe Women of Saturn chronicles the lives of three women of different generations, all living in Montreal in the 1980s, connected and haunted by the same Italian village of their pasts.
When high school teacher Cathy's estranged childhood friend, Lucia is found beaten and abandoned in an apparent act of domestic violence, she takes Lucia's teenage daughter, Angie, into her home. An aspiring writer, Cathy resolves herself to giving Lucia a voice through her writing--and in doing so, relives their journey from Calabria to Canada in 1957, her own family's difficult years after their arrival in Montreal, and the exhilarating, corruption-ridden period of Expo 67.
Meanwhile, rumors swirl about Lucia's family's connections to the Montreal Mafia. Cathy's live-in boyfriend, Sean, sees Angie's presence in their home as a dangerous liability to his career in federal politics - not helped by the fact that Lucia's husband, located in Italy, begins to hurl accusations of corruption against Lucia's family and their business partner with ties to the Member of Parliament for whom Sean works. When these revelations are brought to the attention of Montreal tabloid journalist Antoine--Cathy's former writing mentor, with whom she's had a problematic relationship since her teens--Cathy becomes yet more determined to connect the village stories of the past with the drama of the present, culminating in a confrontation that will forever change her life.
Gripping and as satisfying as southern Italian cuisine,
The Women of Saturn is an important and unforgettable story about the female immigrant experience, and the inescapable impact of the past on our post-modern present.
About the author
Co-director and President of Guernica Editions, Connie Guzzo-McParland has a BA in Italian Literature and a Master's degree in Creative Writing from Concordia University. Upon graduation from the Master's program, she received the David McKeen Award for creative writing for her thesis-novel,
Girotondo. In 2005, an excerpt from this novel,
On the Way to Halifax, translated into Italian, won second prize at the ninth edition of the Premio Letterario Cosseria in Cosseria, Italy. Her novel,
The Girls of Piazza d'Amore, was published in 2013 by Linda Leith Publishing and shortlisted for the Concordia First Novel Award by the Quebec Writer's Federation. Her second novel,
The Women of Saturn, was released in May 2017 by Inanna Publications, She lives in Montreal
