Motherlands

A brilliant exploration of mixed heritage … Gacioppo traces her ancestral footsteps through four cities; Turin, Benghazi, Rome and Palermo … Sometimes, when Gacioppo hits a wall in her efforts to reach back in time, her solution is to enter a reverie in which she imagines what happened. These passages are deliciously written, rich and evocative. They sparkle even amid the crystalline prose of Motherlands as a whole * Guardian *The idea of home - whether real or imagined - animates this blend of memoir and history … and the result is unusual, intimate, and often moving – Matt Elton * BBC History Magazine *Motherlands by Amaryllis Gacioppo (Bloomsbury, £20) is an appropriately hard-to-pin-down sort of book from a writer gifted with multiple heritages surveying the landscapes of her own and her family’s pasts. Note: pasts necessarily in the plural, like those titular motherlands. My favourite books of this type find the big questions (belonging, memory etc) in small, concrete things: an old photo, an old building, a map. It’s not a new approach, but few do it this well. – Daniel Hahn * Spectator *

Amaryllis Gacioppo is a journalist and author with a Joint PhD in Creative Writing from Monash University and the University of Bologna. In 2015 her story ‘Dreams’ won the Lord Mayor of Melbourne Award for Short Story. Her writing has been shortlisted for a number of awards, including the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Scribe Nonfiction Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in Award Winning Australian Writing, Catapult, 3:AM, and elsewhere. This is her first book.