Eugene Mirabelli

Beginning on their wedding night (11 May 1860), when Ava sees first sees that Angelo has the magnificent hindquarters of a stallion, The Goddess in Love with a Horse traces the incredible history of the Cavallu family from the desperations of life in Sicily to the very sky over Boston, Massachusetts.

Entangled stories tell of Ava and Angelo, of Franco the mathematician and Stella, the goddess Venus whom he married. We follow the nighttime adventures of Angelo’s son Fimi and the woman he loved in the dark. We escape from the police over the roofs of Palermo together with revolutionary Morgana and her sensible Orlando. We brave the Atlantic with young Marianna, who follows Pacifico across the ocean to the new world and weds him on the docks of Boston. In America we join Aldo’s quest to win the heart of Irish Molly—and to build and fly his own aeroplane. And we see how a shy, hardworking tailor’s time machine wins him his awkward but patrician American bride.

Myth and reality fuse together, in tales where the real includes the unlikely Garibaldi marching across Sicily and up Italy to free the land, and the myth of the flight of Dedalus becomes real in the skies over the trenches of World War I. Everything in this book is true, says our narrator. If a centaur seems unlikely, so too are Aldo’s aeroplane or Enzo’s time machine, but they, like the unbelievably awful, terrible, horrible, and heartbreaking facts of Sicilian history are true, just as the North End of Boston is true, just as the story of family is true and endures forever.