Seeking Alice

A haunting story of the disintegration of an American and Italian family caught in Europe during World War II.

A haunting story of the disintegration of an American and Italian family caught in Europe during World War II.

Finlaist for the 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the General Adult Fiction category
Winner of the 2017 Italian American Studies Association Book Award

This gripping story of love and loss centers on Marco, an Italian diplomat; Alice, his American wife; and their young children. Stationed in Prague during World War II, Marco and Alice become enemies when the United States enters the war, forcing Alice and the children to move from Prague to Rome and finally to Cernobbio in a desperate attempt to flee to Switzerland. Through alternating passages narrated by Alice and daughter Susie, readers shuttle back and forth between war-torn Europe and 1950s Massachusetts to search for answers and unravel the mystery about what really happened to Alice during the war.

Camilla Trinchieri is the author of The Price of Silence. She lives in New York City.

Camilla Trinchieri is the author of The Price of Silence. She lives in New York City.

"With a careful hand, Trinchieri paints a realistic picture of how love, betrayal, loss, and guilt shape one family in a period when the parameters of daily life shifted constantly … This novel blends a deeply emotional story with an environment that is captivating in its danger and complexity … Seeking Alice is a fully engaging story that doesn't let go until the final page." — Foreword Reviews

"...[an] absorbing narrative … Trinchieri drives toward her conclusion with skill and heart." — Education Update

"...one of those all-too-rare novels that will linger in the mind and memory long after the book itself has been finished and set back upon the shelf … very highly recommended." — Midwest Book Review

"A searing narrative that keeps the reader alert, on the edge, at times almost unbearably so. I could not put the novel down. War inhabits the lives of all the characters of Seeking Alice; it pulses through the novel's own memory. It's the source of loss and the lethal circle the two narrators—and the reader—must penetrate and understand. The journey into which we are drawn may be defined by the broad strokes of history, but it is the fine precision of the intimate detail, the fierceness of love, the rawness of regret, the force of desire and compassion that pull us. A truly wonderful book!" — Edvige Giunta, author of Writing with an Accent and coeditor of Personal Effects

"Like Elsa Morante's History: A Novel and Alberto Moravia's Two Women, Camilla Trinchieri's Seeking Alice is that rare redemptive and all-too-often ignored story of what it's like to be a woman living in a war zone trying to keep yourself and your children safe while trying to maintain your own integrity. It is a redemptive novel of witness about this courageous woman's experience and her daughter's unrelenting drive to recover her mother's true history long after the war is over." — Louise DeSalvo, author of Chasing Ghosts: A Memoir of a Father, Gone to War

"This beautifully written novel is a cross between Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Martha Gellhorn's A Stricken Field. It's about the worst moments of the twentieth century as experienced by a family with no good options, and the love, sacrifice, regret—and triumph—they live with in the face of forces beyond their control." — Kass Fleisher, author of Dead Woman Hollow