A quintessential Calabrian love story. The Girls of Piazza d'Amore traces the lives of three village girls and the forces that lead them to leave home for a new life across the ocean. Set in southern Italy in the 1950s, Connie Guzzo-McParland's short novel walks us through the piazza and the narrow alleys of her own childhood, imaginatively recreating an entire world as seen through the eyes of a young girl who accompanies her friends on their evening passeggiate to the spring water fountain and carries their love notes to the boys they love. The joys of Calabrian village life are palpable, and so are its frustrations and heartbreaks, but this is a world on the cusp of irrevocable change, as family after family is leaving. And that's what is most heartbreaking of all.

Co-director and President of Guernica Editions, Connie Guzzo-McParland has a BA in Italian Literature and a Master's degree in Creative Writing from Concordia University. Upon graduation from the Master's program, she received the David McKeen Award for creative writing for her thesis-novel, Girotondo. In 2005, an excerpt from this novel, On the Way to Halifax, translated into Italian, won second prize at the ninth edition of the Premio Letterario Cosseria in Cosseria, Italy. Her novel, The Girls of Piazza d'Amore, was published in 2013 by Linda Leith Publishing and shortlisted for the Concordia First Novel Award by the Quebec Writer's Federation. Her second novel, The Women of Saturn, was released in May 2017 by Inanna Publications, She lives in Montreal

Connie Guzzo-McParland's profile page

"Through vivid use of language and imagery Connie McParland moves her readers easily between 1950s Italy and present day Montreal. Ultimately, however, The Girls of Piazza d'Amore is not of either place, or time. It transports us somewhere else -- into the heart of memory, and what it means to tell stories.? -- Johanna Skibsrud, Giller prize-winning author of The Sentimentalists

"The Girls of Piazza d'Amore offers a richly textured story of immigration and childhood, expansively set, generously inviting, and full of warmth. With this debut novel, Connie McParland weaves a vivid story that attempts to find meaning in the distance between the decorum of present-day Montreal and the restless soul of a Calabrian childhood. In doing so, she joins a rich lineage of modern Italian-Canadian writing - from Nino Ricci's Lives of the Saints to Vittorio Rossi's A Carpenter's Trilogy - in documenting the complex web of families, traditions, loves and losses spanning across decades and the Atlantic.? -- Dimitri Nasrallah, QWF award-winning author of Niko.