Tamaro, Susanna

(Italian, 1957– )

Tamaro's Follow Your Heart (1994) is an intensely personal narrative which explores the lives of three generations of women within one family. The story is narrated by Olga, a woman in her eighties living as a virtual recluse in Trieste, and is in the form of an extended epistle to her estranged grand-daughter who has moved to America to study. Olga's narrative is dated 1992, but covers earlier periods of the twentieth century, when women's lives were more repressed and circumscribed. She writes her missive to free her grand-daughter from the binds of earlier generations and to suggest spiritual and philosophical routes towards a life based upon individual choice. Anima Mundi (1998) traces the possibilities of a life well lived through the viewpoint of Walter, a shy young boy.

Isabel Allende, Robert M. Pirsig  DJ