Safe in Your Head

An epic story about three generations of Italian women haunted by the shadows of World War II. With love, loyalty, and with faith in magic, a widow and her daughter attempt to survive poverty and the political chaos that seizes their country in spasms through the 1970s, until the violence of the Years of Lead forces them to move across the Atlantic. In America,  they attempt to rebuild their lives, but the widow's granddaughter discovers that safety is an illusion, and no one can outrun the long reach of war. Includes traditional recipes and magic spells.

LAURA VALERI is the author of numerous works of fiction, memoirs, essays on craft and poems. Her debut collection of short stories The Kind of Things Saints Do was the winner of the Iowa/John Simmons Award. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and an MFA from Florida International University.  She lives in Savannah Georgia with her husband Joel Caplan, and she is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro.