We talk with novelists Margot Livesey ( THE HOUSE ON FORTUNE STREET) and Ellen Cooney (Lambrusco).

Livesey’s stunning new novel is about love, loss and the ambiguities of existence. Told from the point of view of four narrators, it explores how they try to make sense of their world when their lives are upended by the unexpected—and how their human frailties lead them to make choices that they long regret. Along the way, the reader is challenged to examine his or her own sense of right and wrong — and the power of forgiveness.

And Ellen Cooney’s LAMBRUSCO is a picaresque, half-comic, half-tragic journey through the war-torn Italian landscape of 1943. Her protagonist, an aria-singing cafe owner named Lucia, goes looking in search of her son, a partisan with the Italian Resistance who has disappeared.
We talk to Cooney about Italy, the Resistance, and the courage of ordinary people in times of war.