$5.99
Details
Sicilian Gothic - The Convergence of Carmelo and Nellie: A Novel Based on the Lives of My Parents
Author: Mario Tosto
Narrator: Mario Tosto, Joan Ostrin
Unabridged: 5 hr 1 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Findaway Voices
Published: 07/04/2019
Genre: Fiction - Biographical
Synopsis
"Most novels don't have footnotes," said a friend. True, but this one is based on real people. Carmelo and Nellie Tosto were my parents. It's a work of fiction because there wasn't enough documentable evidence to write a typical biography.
Unlike today, with its surfeit of personal data – photos, videos, correspondence, diaries, and the like – the period between 1901 and 1939 afforded few opportunities for lower class immigrants to leave tangible evidence of their presence.
Carmelo's history is sparse. His documentation originates at an institution for abandoned infants in Catania, Sicily in 1901. He grew up in a nearby fishing village and at the age of fourteen went to work as a merchant marine sailor until 1925, when he jumped ship in Baltimore to escape Mussolini's conscription..
Nellie was born in Sicily but grew up from infancy in America with serious aspirations to become a Catholic nun. There's much more evidence of her early life, but her character and story needed some enhancement.
After diligent gleaning using powerful internet search tools, I amassed a trove of facts about them. I added whatever I could collect from personal reminiscences, family lore, and artifacts. And though it was exciting to see the early days of my long-gone parents taking shape, it was also frustrating. Like scrapbooks retrieved from a flood, the tides of time had dissolved much detail about them. As the first fruit of their convergence, I didn't know them personally until they were well into their thirties. By then, like most of us, they had changed markedly from their youthful personas. So I assembled their stories with the connective tissue of fiction, based on plausible inferences from facts.
In so doing, my parents became more human, more fascinating, and more endearing than when we made each other miserable in the 1940s and 1950s. I hope this book will help you appreciate them better than I did then, and as much as I do now.
by Jean Reinhardt
A Year of Broken Promises continues the story of James and Mary McGrother, a young Irish fisherman and his wife, who were the main characters in A Pocket Full of Shells. Even with the famine years behind them, tragedy and hardship does not stop. Pr...
Published: 07/25/2017
by Leya Delray
In a tiny town on the coast of Lancashire, Lily Brown is trying to hold her world together.With England in the throes of World War II, her alcoholic father a prisoner overseas, and her mother struggling to make ends meet, she is convinced marrying h...
Published: 08/30/2020
by Jean Reinhardt
As the past catches up with Catherine, one of her sisters becomes a thorn in her side. To make life even more stressful for her, the young woman finds herself torn between two of the people she loves most in the world. As her husband, Patrick, does ...
Published: 09/26/2017
by Jean Reinhardt
The mid-1800s is a time of great change for James McGrother and his family. Friendship and loyalty draw the Irish fisherman into a world he would rather stay away from. Choices must be made that could bring the wrath of an old enemy upon James's hea...
Published: 08/29/2017
by Jean Reinhardt
It's the 1880s, and James and Mary McGrother's family has been divided by emigration, like many of their neighbors in the village of Blackrock in county Louth. The couple who survived the Great Hunger have had to watch more than half their family le...
Published: 10/24/2017
by Leo Tolstoy
Boyhood by Leo Tolstoy narrated in a Traditional English accent.The semi autobiographical story of Leo Tolstoys childhood which gives us all little insights into why he became one of the greatest, if not the greatest writer of all time.
Published: 07/01/2019
by Dean R. Blanchard
A father struggles to tell his long-lost daughter that he is not a predatory sexual molester. A promising ring becomes the symbol of a boy's love for a girl he thought he knew. A son stands by his dying mother, and in return, she helps him to make p...
Published: 11/30/2018
by Jane Mendelsohn
In this brilliantly imagined novel, Amelia Earhart tells us what happened after she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared off the coast of New Guinea one glorious, windy day in 1937. And she tells us about herself.There is her love affair with...
Published: 11/03/2015
by Jean Reinhardt
In 1846 a baby girl is born to a young Irish fisherman and his wife. It is the second year of the Great Hunger and the young couple choose to remain in Ireland, while family and friends are leaving. Their story takes place in the fishing village of ...
Published: 06/14/2017