A recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters/Katherine Anne Porter Award for fiction in 2006, Arturo Vivante has been an acclaimed and beloved storyteller for over fifty years. Seventy of his short stories have appeared in The New Yorker. In his third and newest novel, Truelove Knot, he artfully orchestrates a tale of first love during World War II.


With that auspicious entrance into the world, Fabio Diodati begins an idyllic childhood and boyhood first in Rome and Siena, then in England where his family went as refugees in 1938. In late adolescence, Fabio is away from home in a boarding school in Wales when Italy enters the war. Being Italian, Fabio is interned and sent to Canada. Months elapse with Fabio behind barbed wire in a camp on an island in the St. Lawrence River, in sight of Montreal. Then, in the midst of a snow storm in 1941, the seventeen-year-old escapes to Montreal where, in the space of little more than a day, he finds freedom, first love, and goes out to meet his fate at sea.


Readers familiar with Vivante’s short stories will recognize his gentle touch and limpid description. Artfully, he orchestrates characters’ lives so that they encounter, as we all do, forces beyond their control. Yet lives that could seem bleak and insignificant are tempered by Vivante with small but important acts of kindness, courage, and love. The rich world he creates—one peopled by characters yearning for lives not lived and chances not taken—is a pleasure to enter and savor.