After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage is the story of two marriages undone by a dowry and the fallout from that rift on three generations of a Southern Italian family. Enlisting Calabrian folklore, epigenetics, and psychology, Monardo writes from both sides of the ocean, charting her grandfathers’ immigration to Braddock, a Pittsburgh steel town; her father’s wartime as a medical student in Naples; the family’s marriages—including her own—that were tainted by an Old World curse; and an unlikely path to international adoption.

Anna Monardo grew up in Pittsburgh, with strong ties to her Calabrian family. Her first novel, The Courtyard of Dreams, set largely in southern Italy, was translated into German, Norwegian, and Danish; featured in the Selected Shorts reading series at Symphony Space in New York City; and nominated for a PEN/Hemingway Award and recommended for the National Book Critics Circle Awards.