Postmarked

For eleven years, Lana Hadžić never left her mother's side. Now a hospice full of nurses is sending her somewhere she's never been - and the only map she has is in her mother's hands.

Lana was nineteen when her mother, Amra, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. At thirty-one, she has spent her entire adult life caring for her in a small apartment in Van Nuys, California, and now she is alone. Amra came to America as a refugee from Sarajevo, and she never talked about the year in between. At the very end, when she had forgotten everything, even her daughter's name, her hands kept making the same motion: a scoop, a lift, a gentle shake, laying something down. Nobody knew what it was.

Then, at a hospice charity gala, the nurses secretly pool their money to win the silent auction's grand prize for Lana: two weeks on Italy's Amalfi Coast. In her mother's dresser, Lana has found a worn phrasebook, a postcard from Ravello bearing a single name, Rosaria, and four sheets of handmade paper with a tiny lemon hidden in the light.

In a green gorge above Amalfi, at the last family paper mill in the Valley of the Mills, Lana finds the answer. She also finds Nico Ruocco, a guarded engineer-turned-papermaker who is barely holding his family's centuries-old mill together, and who wants nothing to do with one more stranger asking questions. Until she stands in his door.

A heartfelt, closed-door romance about grief and memory, a refugee's lost summer of 1993, lemon groves and cathedral bells, a saint carried up sixty-two steps, and what our hands remember when the heart forgets.

Postmarked: Amalfi is Book Five of the Postmarked series. Each book stands on its own.