Anne Licata-Solaas – författare

Maria Liotta wants one thing: to read. In early twentieth-century Sicily, that's not a girl's place to want.Sicily, 1897. Twelve-year-old Maria works for the powerful Abruzzi family, her hunger for a life of the mind refusing to die even as the world tells her it doesn't matter. When her grandfather dies and her father's silence grows unbearable, she and her mother cross the Atlantic to find him.What they find in America is not what they imagined.One of those discoveries is Baldassare Licata, a face Maria knows from home, newly released from a brutal labor camp in New York. What begins as recognition becomes something more. But building a life together in Brooklyn means navigating the Black Hand's shadow, and dangers the old country never prepared them for. New York itself becomes a threat, and they must choose between the life they have built and an uncertain road westward.Based on the true story of the author's Sicilian family, The Scent of Lemons unfolds between 1897 and 1911.

Maria Licata came to America with a fierce and simple dream: to give her family a life worth living. When New York grows too dangerous and work runs scarce, the family trades Brooklyn's tenements for Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the punishing work of the railroad, bringing with them everything Sicilian immigrants carry: stubbornness, faith, and the memory of home.Cheyenne does not go easy on the Licatas. Children are buried. The Spanish Flu takes what war hasn't. Prohibition turns neighbors into criminals and criminals into kings. Wars, the Spanish flu, poverty, and the cold cruelty of prejudice have made that dream feel impossibly fragile.When the family finally leaves for California in search of something steadier, Baldassare's brother Nick is waiting there with opportunity, and Maria discovers that the most dangerous threats are the ones wearing a familiar face. The choices Nick makes will ripple through generations. And when World War II arrives, being Italian in America means living under a shadow of suspicion that no amount of loyalty can fully lift.At the center of it all is Maria, the girl who crossed an ocean to find her father, now the woman holding a family together across decades of loss. Her faith deepens. Her hard-won literacy becomes her weapon. She keeps her illness to herself.Based on the true story of the author's Sicilian family, The Scent of Lemons, Part Two: The Far West unfolds between 1911 and 1944.

Post-war Los Angeles glitters with possibility and danger. Three men of the Licata family walk the same city on entirely different roads, bound by blood and by secrets neither has fully told the other.Nick Licata has become what he always intended to become: the don of the Los Angeles crime family, charismatic and powerful and completely certain the ends justify the means. What it costs his wife, Josie, and their children is a calculation he has chosen not to make.His nephew Joe wants nothing to do with any of it. A banker. A family man. An honest life built deliberately apart from Nick's shadow. But the shadow keeps finding him, and when blackmail and alcoholism arrive together, Joe must decide how much integrity a man can afford to keep.Nick's son Carlo is trapped in Detroit, married into a crime family that views him as useful but never quite legitimate. He dreams of Havana, of the Lemonade Lounge, of a life that finally fits. What he finds in Cuba is glamor, revolution, and consequences he didn't calculate.From the glittering nightclubs of 1950s Los Angeles to the revolution-torn streets of Havana, The Scent of Lemons, Part Three is a novel about power, loyalty, and what happens to a family when the sins of one generation become the inheritance of the next.Based on a true story, The Scent of Lemons, Part 3: The Next Generation continues the story of The Scent of Lemons, Part 2: The Far West and The Scent of Lemons, Part 1: A Sicilian Journey.