Vita A Novel [Paperback]

ANew York Times Book ReviewEditors' Choice

In April 1903, Diamante, age twelve, and Vita, age nine, are sent by their poor families in southern Italy to make a life for themselves in America. Theirs is an unforgettable love story, a riveting tale of immigrant survival and hope that takes them from the crime-ridden tenements of Little Italy to the brutal rail yards of the Midwest, on paths that cross with the Black Hand, Caruso, and Chaplin. It is a story that reaches across decades, to the son of Vita, who would travel as far as Italy to find his roots and the man who could have been his father.

InVita,the author, Melania G. Mazzucco, also tells her own story of how she found Diamante and Vita in old photographs, documents, ship manifests, and the fading memories of her relatives, and from these fragments of the past imagined this gripping epic fiction of her family's history.

Melania G. Mazzuccowas born in Rome in 1966. She earned a degree in Italian literature from the University of Rome La Sapienza and a degree in cinema from the Experimental Center for Cinematography. In addition to her four novels, she has written award-winning works for the cinema, theater, and radio.Vitawas awarded the 2003 Strega Prize, Italy's leading literary award.

Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think Kermit Roosevelt ends each part of the prologue with outside characters' approach to the law?
2. The tone of each characters' introduction is one of examination. Why do you believe the author chooses to being their stories this way?
3. What role does the history of the Morgan Siler firm play in the lives of the lawyers who now work for the company? Is the transformation of the firm representative of other changes?
4. The question of capital-C character: Aside from narrative action, how do characters reveal their true characters ? Consider their physical, material worlds, the way they speak to otherlÃ-