Amy’s Story
A Novel
After Elena Ferrante, another powerful Italian voice emerges to tell a tale of immigration with two strong women characters at its center. It includes love, struggle, and social turmoil.
Amy’s Story unfolds on the background of American history, from the late 1960s up until 2011, providing an interesting commentary on the highlights in history that influenced the development of American society over the past 40 years and brought about the current outcome.
Praise for Amy’s Story
“Amy’s Story is simply spellbinding. This is a story at once about identity, love and social upheaval; a woman’s journey from old world to new; from Italy to America. Mysterious, brave and captivating.”
—Joe McGinniss Jr., author of Carousel Court and The Delivery Man
“From the collapsing towers of 9/11 to the lyrical groves of northern Italy, the author ingeniously morphs Amy’s Story into a journey across America and back and forth across time. Along the way we meet a cohort of colorful characters, witness several romances, and there are wars and politics, too—all woven into a mesmerizing narrative that unspools like a good film. Anna Lawton is not only a scholar of the first rank, but a deft and artful novelist with a flair for the unexpected in her work.”
—Louis Menashe, author of Moscow Believes in Tears: Russians and Their Movies
“Lawton’s characters connect to words with dynamic interactions and intellectual alacrity. This author’s voice manages both the interior lives of her characters and the connective tissue of their worlds. Anna Lawton’s mastery of story orchestrates the best out of ‘situation and plot,’ with a full range of motion using the entire emotional alphabet.”
—Grace Cavalieri, Host/Producer, “The Poet and the Poem” from the Library of Congress
“Amy’s Story by Anna Lawton sets a tempestuous romance against the turbulent half-century of global change that erupted in the 1960s and flowed across the land like a modern Great Flood. The private romance and the public turmoil work together to create a story as much about love as it is about progress, about aspiration and success as about longing and loss.”
—Ben East, BenEastBooks.com
Amy’s Story
A Novel
by Anna Lawton
Washington, DC
This is a novel and, therefore, a work of fiction. References to historical figures, historical events, real people and real places are part of the fictional world created by the author. Other characters and places are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual people or places is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Anna Lawton 2016
New Academia Publishing, 2017
Published in eBook format by THESPRING
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016915448
ISBN 978-0-9974962-1-5 paperback (alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-9974962-0-8 hardcover (alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-9986433-6-6 ebook
THESPRING is an imprint of New Academia Publishing
New Academia Publishing
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For the home of the brave
Memory moves constantly. It’s not like going to the storage room and picking up a thing that has been sitting there unchanged. We have already been working for years on that thing.
— Umberto Eco
(La memoria è sempre in movimento. Non è qualcosa che ci permette di andare in magazzino e prendere una cosa come era là senza che nessuno l’abbia modificata. È già una cosa su cui noi abbiamo lavorato durante gli anni.)
PART ONE—Beginning from the End (2001)
I
New York, September 2001
“Mulberry and Canal, please.”
The cabbie looks at her in the rearview mirror while the car pulls off into the Broadway traffic.
“Are you a tourist?”
“No, I’m a New Yorker.”
“But you were not born in New York?”
This puts her off. This really puts her off. Thirty plus years in this country and they still pick up traces of her Italian accent. Traces, mind you. It’s practically all gone.
“Were you?” she asks, staring at the prayer beads dangling from the mirror. There is a note of irritation in her voice. The mirror sends back to her the liquid gaze of two dark eyes, now slightly sweetened with the hint of a smile.
“None of my business, miss. Just trying to make conversation.”
Okay, he wants to be friendly. Let’s be friendly.
“So, where are you from?”
“Afghanistan.”
Image association. Amy sees flashes of Soviet tanks roaming the country, ambushes on mountain passes, destroyed cities and villages—the footage she used to see in the news twenty years ago. Then, she recalls recent humanitarian appeals for women executed in sport fields, their burkas looking like the hoods of witches burnt at the stake in medieval times.
“How long’ve you been here?” she asks.
“Since 1981. I was a kid. My family was among the lucky ones who made it. We loved our country, it was very beautiful. But then the Russians came, you know, they upset everything. And now a pack of mad dogs took power.”
“Yeah, the Talibans. Is this what they’re called? They’re the ones who blew up those ancient Buddha sculptures,
