One Woman's View (Paperback or Softback)

It begins, as these things do, on a ship - a six-year-old Sicilian boy crossing the Atlantic in 1919 with a sick mother and a rosary in his pocket. He became Joseph Cassaro, and he became the beginning of a family, and the family became, in time, the woman telling this story.

One Woman's View is the warm, funny, unflinching memoir of a granddaughter of that crossing - an Italian-American girl from Auburn, New York, who inherited the food and the faith and the fierce family loyalty, came through the unthinkable and the broken road, and built a life her grandfather could never have imagined an ocean away, in an England of village lanes and white picket fences, beside the woman she loves.

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, One Woman's View is about family and food, grief and grace, and the roads that break us and the ones that carry us home. One woman's story, told exactly as loudly as she lived it.

Donna Matthews writes historical fiction and memoir rooted in Sicily and the immigrant experience. The granddaughter of a Sicilian who came through Ellis Island in 1919, she grew up Italian-American in Upstate New York and has lived in the UK for twenty-six years. Her memoir One Woman's View: A Life Lived Loudly and its companion novel The Beads He Carried are published under her own name. As DM Matthews she writes the I Veri historical-crime saga - The Gabellotto's Daughter and The Last Name - set across Sicily and immigrant America. She publishes under Cassaro Publishing.