Description: Stories of Sicily, immigration, and the lives of Sicilian women in the early 20th century.
Review Quotes: Praise for Behind Closed Doors
"[T]hese ten persuasive tales offer stark, finely drawn portraits of poor and middle-class Sicilian women in the early years of the twentieth century." -The New York Review of Books "A window into another time and another culture... We understand the emotions of [the] characters, simultaneously victims and heroines... Messina's words will leave their mark. Their power makes them impossible to forget." --The Philadelphia Inquirer "Virtually the only great Italian fiction about the massive Sicilian immigration to America written while it was happening... honed, polished, devastatingly direct--verismo at its unsentimental best." --Booklist