Introduction by Donatella Melucci

With a style that fascinates and intrigues from the first page, Laura Benedetti tells the sweet and never saccharine story of three generations of women who end up in Maryland and Utah from Abruzzo. What is striking about the book, in addition to the interesting, current and thought-provoking story, is the way of writing that says a lot with a few words.

Locked in a modest cinerary urn, Alice's mortal remains follow with estranged participation the events of the two generations of women that the old librarian from Abruzzo who moved to the United States left behind.

Her daughter Jane, the heroine of an almost complete conformism, and her granddaughter Sara, a sulky adolescent in the midst of a crisis of moral growth and sexual identity, do their utmost to respect the emigrant matriarch's dazed last wishes, and the youngest offers to take her ashes to Italy.

A different country awaits her from the one inscribed in her imagination, as different as the figure of her missing grandmother, in a journey that forces her to measure the distance between past and present, illusion and reality, the reasons of those who leave and those who stay. (https://www.pacinieditore.it/prodotto/un-paese-di-carta/)

A Paper Country addresses issues of cultural identity, family ties, uprooting and loss.

The English version, A Country of Paper, was published in 2022 by New Academia Publishing.

Laura Benedetti is Professor of Italian Literature at Georgetown University (Washington, DC, USA) where she is also Chair of the Department of Italian Studies.