Beside the Mountain

"Stefania has developed a powerful, almost incantatory narrative voice. It is this insistent, remembering speaker whose words we really want to keep listening to, who draws us on through a tale that is both unusual and familiar." - Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism and the forthcoming Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

"What makes this memoir of a father's descent into early Alzheimer's press itself into the reader's soul is not the meticulous care in evoking the stages of this tragic illness and its toll on a family, nor the revelatory cutting of the daughter-author in response to the suffering of her father, nor the rich back and forth between St. Louis and Italy, nor the courageous honesty seen on practically every page, but the love. Plain and heartbreaking, all the way, through everything. Stefania Silvestri is a real writer. I think of D.H. Lawrence's great lines, 'Look! We have come through!'

Gregory Orfalea, celebrated author of several works, including Angeleno Days: An Arab American Writer on Family, Place, and Politics