Petra's Quest - Paperback

A heartfelt multi-generational family story * Immersed in San Francisco and Italian history * Woven with Old World culture * Driven by ancestral mystery.

1906: A devastating earthquake and fire have ravaged the City by the Bay, leaving Italian immigrant and stonemason Angelo Lari with nothing but shattered dreams. The daily wages he'd saved to bring his young wife to America have vanished in flames, along with the boarding house he'd called home. Defeated, he contemplates returning to the Old Country, yet the poverty and political unrest that drove him away two years earlier have only grown. Amid his despair, an unexpected opportunity emerges from the City's ashes, offering a future beyond anything he could have imagined.

1963: Petra Duffey explores the aisles of a beatnik bookstore in San Francisco's Little Italy. Guided by an instinct she doesn't fully understand, she feels called to uncover and preserve her family's ancestral stories. Browsing the local history section, she hopes to find titles that connect her Lari grandparents with the City's colorful past. But it's her new friendship with a woman-whose face eerily resembles her own-that leads to stories never printed on paper. Ones revealed at a family reunion in the ancient stone villages of Tuscany.

317 pages