This week in The Mindful Reader a terrific historical novel-police procedural by Lucretia Grindle. Here’s the beginning of the column, which ran in today’s New Hampshire Sunday News.
The Mindful Reader: Finding Italy in ‘The Lost Daughter’
Boston native Lucretia Grindle lives on the Maine coast as well as in England. In the afterword of her new novel, The Lost Daughter she explains that after 9/11, she and her husband talked about “what they would choose to do if the world were going to fly to pieces.” Grindle recalls saying, “I want to go to the Uffizi. If World War III is going to break out, let’s go to Florence.”
That decision turned out to be the first of many trips to Italy, which she calls “one of the most intellectually rich, vibrant, and contradictory countries in the world. . . .” Her extensive travel has inspired several novels.
“The Lost Daughter” is set in contemporary Florence and late 1960s-1970s Ferrara and Rome. It’s both a mystery and a historical novel, examining the years when Italy was in the grip of the Brigate Rosse, or Red Brigade, a militant leftist group. When the book opens, the story is focused on a 17-year-old American student, Kristin Carson, who’s studying art history in Florence and has a much older boyfriend she met online and knows only as Dante. When her prominent and well-connected orthopedic surgeon father and her stepmother fly to Italy for her 18th birthday, they learn she has disappeared.
That decision turned out to be the first of many trips to Italy, which she calls “one of the most intellectually rich, vibrant, and contradictory countries in the world. . . .” Her extensive travel has inspired several novels.
“The Lost Daughter” is set in contemporary Florence and late 1960s-1970s Ferrara and Rome. It’s both a mystery and a historical novel, examining the years when Italy was in the grip of the Brigate Rosse, or Red Brigade, a militant leftist group. When the book opens, the story is focused on a 17-year-old American student, Kristin Carson, who’s studying art history in Florence and has a much older boyfriend she met online and knows only as Dante. When her prominent and well-connected orthopedic surgeon father and her stepmother fly to Italy for her 18th birthday, they learn she has disappeared.
You can read the rest here.
bookconscious 
Leave a Reply