I took out my three remaining books and looked at them. One of them I would have to translate if I were to eat this winter. It could be this one, the story of an older woman falling foolishly in love. Or this one, the story of a strange journey to a distant land. Or perhaps this one, which I had overlooked because its cover was so drab, the story of…
I began reading, and as soon as I began, I knew. It was the right book. It was the perfect book.
I could tell already: It was going to become mine.
Acknowledgments
The letter attributed to Vittoria Brunelli, a fictional character, is taken from a letter by seventeenth-century composer Lavinia della Pietà. It appears in Women Musicians of Venice, by Jane L. Baldauf-Berdes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
My great thanks to Liana Borghi, Tere Carranza, Faith Conlon, Cathy Johnson, Gail and Betsy Leondar-Wright, Cristina Manozzi and Pat Mullan.
About the Author
Barbara Wilson is the pen name under which Barbara Sjoholm has published the Cassandra Reilly Mysteries and the Pam Nilsen Mysteries. Gaudí Afternoon, of the Cassandra Reilly series, won a Lambda Literary Award and a Crime Writers’ Association Award, and was made into a film by the same name. Like her detective Cassandra Reilly, Sjoholm is a translator, but of Norwegian and Danish books. In addition to her fiction and the memoir Blue Windows, Sjoholm is the author of the travel books The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea, Incognito Street, and The Palace of the Snow Queen. Her essays have appeared in the American Scholar, Harvard Review, the New York Times, Smithsonian, and Slate, among other publications.
For more about Barbara Sjoholm, please visit www.barbarasjoholm.com.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by Barbara Wilson
Cover design by Tracy Dunham
978-1-4804-5519-1
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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