Camilla Trinchieri, sister of our neighbor and friend, Carol Sutherland, has authored a series of mysteries under the pseudonym Camilla Crespi.  Recently, as Camilla Thrichieri, she has published an autobiographical novel, Seeking Alice. Here is how she describes her book.

"Seeking Alice is a psychological study of the disintegration of an American and Italian family caught in Europe during WWII, of a mother trying to save her children and losing her mind, of a daughter’s attempt, years later, to recover the mother she has lost. 

It is a personal story for me and my sister Carol.  I was only a baby during the years I describe in the novel. She lived through it.

When the United States entered WWII our American mother, pregnant with me, found herself and her three young children trapped in Prague, Czechoslovakia overrun by Nazis.  The day the United States entered the war, she became an enemy to my father, an Italian diplomat for the Fascist government, as he was now her enemy. Two months after I was born she became mentally ill and we lost her.  

In the novel a mother and daughter try to find themselves and each other across time. The story is told in alternating chapters by a pregnant Susie in 1956, now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and by her mother Alice during the war years as she and her children are forced to move from Prague, to Rome and finally to Cernobbio on Lake Como in a desperate attempt to flee to Switzerland."

Come to a Saturday morning Meet & Mingle, February 25, 11 a.m. at Chevy Chase Village Hall to meet her and learn more about this most personal experience.


              Membership volunteer: Lucy