Suzanne Uttaro Samuels "Seeds of the Pomegranate" Ptown : 10/4 - 6pm

East End Books Ptown presents: Suzanne Uttaro Samuels "Seeds of the Pomegranate" 10/4 - 6pm

Seeds of the Pomegranate immerses readers in early 20th century Sicily and the daily life of Mimi Inglese, a talented painter who aspires to be the first woman to attend the Palermo Art Academy. When she contracts tuberculosis, her dreams are shattered, along with any hope of escaping the rigid expectations of women of her class who are totally dependent on their male relatives for their social status and well-being.

When Mimi’s father’s estate is threatened with financial ruin, she and her family join the waves of Italians fleeing to America. In New York City, Mimi is inexorably drawn into her father’s money-laundering scheme and, when her father is caught and imprisoned, she works to counterfeit her own $5 bills to save her family and fund her future.

Mimi is overwhelmed by grief when her sister dies, and abandons her artistic ambitions to care for her sister’s son. Threatened by gang violence and burned out of their tenement in a devastating fire, Mimi and her nephew must make their escape.

Spurred by the discovery that her Sicilian grandfather survived a 1922 tenement fire, like Mimi’s nephew, the author spent years piecing together news clippings, Pr*son records, and autopsy reports to reconstruct her own family’s past and then used the historical record to richly imagine the rest. Inspired, as Mimi was, by the ancient myth of the goddess Persephone, who willingly ate the red fruit to remain queen of the underworld, Seeds of the Pomegranate is the story of a woman who finally chooses to exercise her own power.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Suzanne Uttaro Samuels’ award-winning stories and essays have appeared in anthologies and print and online literary magazines. Seeds of the Pomegranate is her debut novel. Suzanne was a finalist in the Women Fiction Writers Association’s Rising Star contest and the Historical Novel Society’s First Pages competition. Her work won notable recognition in the Thomas Wolfe Prize for Fiction. The prequel to Seeds, The Orphans’ Wheel, set during the tumultuous 19th-century Italian Wars of Independence, is forthcoming from Sibylline Press. A lifelong resident of New York City, Suzanne now resides in the Adirondack Mountains.

ADVANCE PRAISE

"A riveting and intelligent novel with a powerful message." – Kirkus

"Readers will be satisfied by this nuanced character portrait." -- Publishers Weekly

“Seeds of the Pomegranate shows the unpaid labor and lost opportunities for women in a brutal immigrant Italian family, and one woman's determination to create art and a life for herself against all the rules and conventions. In luminous prose, Samuels weaves the myth of Persephone in the Underworld through this tale of art and love surviving repression and familial obligations. A remarkable debut.” – Julia Park Tracey, author of Silence: A Novel

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