"Openwork is glorious! The fine poetic intelligence that guides it, the humor, the sadness, and Bernardi's overarching knowledge of so many times and places and peoples. A remarkable book, a beautiful book."
—Jane Hamilton

 “In prose as radiant and emotionally precise as Virginia Woolf’s, Bernardi illuminates the working lives and longings of coal miners and wet-nurses, seamstresses, stone masons, and housewives, brilliantly rendering a century in the life of an Italian-American family.  Like Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, this is a novel in which the sentences themselves capture the feel of human beings at work.”—Andrea Barrett

“An epic tale of love, loss, and longing.  A family, riven by poverty and calamity, yet united by a craving for justice.  Bernardi’s powerful emigration tale illuminates the Italian American soul.”—Louise DeSalvo

The novel begins with the maternal, troubled, Imola Bartolai, who knows every stitch in needlework and tries to keep her fractured family together in a poor village in Italy. Men travel for work and daughters marry and emigrate, ever to be seen again.   Her favorite brother, Egidio, working in a coal mines in Dawson, New Mexico, is silenced, and his old friend, Antenore Gimmori, moves us through his struggle for labor rights into stone work in the Chicago suburbs. Antenore’s fully assimilated granddaughter, Adele, a worrier with a love of Latin etymology, closes the circle begun by Imola by traveling to Italy to repair the past.  The voices of the two women, separated by a hundred years, prove there are many threads that bind them.