Christopher Castellani reads from All This Talk of Love (Algonquin Books, 2013)

All This Talk of Love, the third novel in Christopher Castellani’s series about the Grasso family, is a moving and engaging depiction of family history in the context of the immigrant experience. After World War II, Maddalena Grasso and her husband Antonio immigrated to the United States, leaving behind her parents, sisters, and brothers in Santa Cecilia. Decades later, Maddalena feels no need to delve into the past and expose the unmended rifts of another life. But her daughter Prima, seeing her parents aging, organizes a family trip to Italy, hoping to reunite Maddalena with her estranged sister and help her parents see their homeland one last time. Instead, this plan threatens to tear the Grasso family apart, until unwelcome surprises intervene, and their trip home becomes imperative.

“Castellani writes movingly, affectingly of immigrant life, of the dichotomy of cultures, of the persistence of love across generations.”

—Kirkus Reviews