The Vietri Project: A Novel

Written by Nicola DeRobertis-Theye

Narrated by Sophie Amoss

A Lithub, Good Reads, Bustle, and The Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2021

""The Vietri Project is a riveting, shifting quest, an evocative trip to Rome, and a beautiful portrayal of the ways you need to return to the past in order to move forward. A great delight from start to finish.”--Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers and Lovers

A search for a mysterious customer in Rome leads a young bookseller to confront the complicated history of her family, and that of Italy itself, in this achingly intimate debut with echoes of Lily King and Elif Batuman.

Working at a bookstore in Berkeley in the years after college, Gabriele becomes intrigued by the orders of signor Vietri, a customer from Rome whose numerous purchases grow increasingly mystical and esoteric. Restless and uncertain of her future, Gabriele quits her job and, landing in Rome, decides to look up Vietri. Unable to locate him, she begins a quest to unearth the well-concealed facts of his life.

Following a trail of obituaries and military records, a memoir of life in a village forgotten by modernity, and the court records of a communist murder trial, Gabriele meets an eclectic assortment of the city’s inhabitants, from the widow of an Italian prisoner of war to members of a generation set adrift by the financial crisis. Each encounter draws her unexpectedly closer to her own painful past and complicated family history—an Italian mother diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized during her childhood, and an extended family in Rome still recovering from the losses and betrayals in their past. Through these voices and histories, Gabriele will discover what it means to be a person in the world; a member of a family and a citizen of a country—and how reconciling these stories may be the key to understanding her own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Mar 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9780063017733

Nicola DeRobertis-Theye

Nicola DeRobertis-Theye was an Emerging Writing Fellow at the New York Center for Fiction, and her work has been published in Agni, Electric Literature, and LitHub. A graduate of UC Berkeley, she received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, where she was the fiction editor of its literary magazine Ecotone. She is a native of Oakland, CA and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews for The Vietri Project

[juliestielstra · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The review in the New York Times sounded promising: a young woman is intrigued by a long-distance customer of the bookstore where she works, who orders long lists of esoteric books to be shipped to him in Italy. It occurs to her (her life doesn't seem to have much active direction) to try to find him when she's doing her solo world tour (nice to have the leisure and money to just fly around the globe when you're bored and discontented). She resists engagement with her family, except if they might be useful. She's worried she might become schizophrenic as her own mother did when exactly her age. That's pretty much it. It's a whole lot of pretentious brooding and navel-gazing, all the "coming of age," "who am I really?" stuff I found tedious when I was twenty-five, occasionally punctuated by equally dull and mechanical sex. I was mainly interested in the old Italian customer, who proves elusive, leaving behind a notebook written in Arabic crammed with maps and notes, which the narrator (we eventually learn her name is Gabriele) obtains under false pretenses. Gabriele sits around while her cousin's friends help translate the contents, and she isn't even interested in that, daydreaming and doodling while the friends seriously parse out the text. Halfway through the not-very-long book, the jaded, weary tone just lost me. Gabriele herself admits she was most interested in meeting Signore Vietri, maybe talking about the books he ordered, and when he isn't immediately producible, slumps back into her ennui. So did I. I don't know what happens after that, but I did try, and failed to care.

[linda.marsheells · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I tried, I really did....... maybe if i was a bit more intellectual i'd have had the wherewithal to finish? Interesting story of a U.S. bookseller, and her mission to track down an Italian customer of eclectic books. Dry in parts, but it was the authors wit that kept me from waving the white flag sooner!