Born of Earthquake and Volcano

Stella Fiorinelli is the daughter of Italian immigrants living in New York City. She considers herself a progressive and enlightened woman, but her life is turned upside down when she stumbles upon a mysterious and disturbing photo in her father's armoire.

He dies before he can explain it, and to find the answers she longs for, Stella goes down a dark rabbit hole of grief and ancestral discoveries. Her journey takes her back to WWII Italy and the early lives of her parents-Maria, a precocious young girl in Sicily, and Domenico, a brooding boy in Abruzzo.

Stella soon realizes she may not have known as much about her family as she thought, and the lines between the old world of her ancestors and the present and between the fraught political landscapes of then and now become blurred.

Standing at the threshold of assimilation and reclamation, will she find the answers she's so desperately seeking before she loses herself?

Born of Earthquake and Volcano is a multi-generational tale of dreams deferred, inherited trauma, the long shadow of the past, and a reckoning with truth.

Ester Maria Segretto is a first generation Italian American, born and raised in Queens, New York. She has a peculiar preoccupation with the histories of World War II and Italy's Mezzogiorno. Ester graduated from School of Visual Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography and lives in New York City with her husband and their two feline familiars. Born of Earthquake and Volcano is her first novel.