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It is the fall of 1942 and Giampaolo Stagno is starving. A soldier in the beleaguered Italian Army, the young Sicilian is captured and shipped from North Africa to the United States as a prisoner of war, assigned to a POW camp in New Jersey.

A hundred miles from the camp, in Pennsylvania, Eleanor Fazzio is also starving-for a different life. She works in a textile mill and returns home each day to her mother and cousins and their close-knit Italian-American immigrant community. War has limited the possibilities for a thirty-year-old woman in Eleanor's corner of America, and she longs for another kind of life.

Giampaolo and Eleanor know nothing of each other, though they share the customs and dialect of their island homeland, Sicily. Fate conspires to bring the couple together: their common heritage, shaped thousands of miles apart, forges a tentative bond between them. But the vagaries of a world war and its aftermath drive them apart, thrusting the pair into an uncertain future.