The Saint of Lost Things: A Novel - Tapa dura

In a 1953 Italian neighborhood in Delaware, Maddalena Grasso, her husband Antonio, and Guilio Fabbri live in the shadows of St. Anthony's Church, where their prayers are heard and fate and circumstances intervene to answer them in unforeseeable ways.

It is 1953 in the tight-knit Italian neighborhood in Wilmington, Delaware. In the shadow of St. Anthony's Church, named for the patron staint of lost things, lives the Grasso family. Young Maddalena, a seamstress pregnant with her first child, misses the rolling hills and olive groves of the small Italian town where she was born and longs for her sisters and her mother and father—all so distant, so far away from America. Maddalena's mercurial husband, Antonio, feels lucky to be in the land of opportunity and dreams only of opening his own restaurant, until he becomes unwittingly embroiled in his friends' vengeful plot against a neighbor.

Down the street from the Grassos lives Giulio Fabbri, a shy accordion player, still single at forty, who's lost his beloved parents and has dreams of his own: to leave the shelter of his childhod home and reinvent himself.

When Maddalena falls dangerously ill and Antonio's and Giulio's faith is challenged, the prayers of these troubled but steadfast people are heard, and fate and circumstances conspire to answer them in unforeseeable ways.

With great affection and a profound understanding of human frailty and perseverance, Christopher Castellani brings to life a bittersweet time when the world seemed more intimate and knowable, and the American Dream simpler, nobler, and within reach.