Juliet's Nurse

Description

In Verona, a city ravaged by plague and political rivalries, a mother mourning the death of her day-old infant enters the household of the powerful Cappelletti family to become the wet-nurse to their newborn baby. As she serves her beloved Juliet over the next fourteen years, the nurse learns the Cappelletti's darkest secrets. Those secrets-and the nurse's own deepest personal grief-erupt across five momentous days of love and loss that destroy a daughter, and a family. By turns comic, sensual, and tragic, JULIET'S NURSE gives voice to one of literature's most memorable and distinctive characters, a woman who was both insider and outsider among Verona's wealthy ruling class. Exploring the romance and intrigue of interwoven loyalties, rivalries, jealousies, and losses only hinted at in Shakespeare's play, JULIET'S NURSE offers an original perspective and a never-before-heard tale of the deepest love in Verona-the love between a grieving woman and her precious milk-daughter. In the tradition of Sarah Dunant, Philippa Gregory, and Geraldine Brooks, JULIET'S NURSE is a rich prequel and reimagining of a classic tale.
Drawing readers into the romance and danger of fourteenth-century Italy, JULIET'S NURSE is an engrossing novel of love and loss, suffering, and survival.

Author description

Award-winning author Lois Leveen dwells in the spaces where literature and history meet. A former faculty member at UCLA and Reed College, Lois holds degrees in history and literature from Harvard University, the University of Southern California, and UCLA. Her work has appeared in numerous literary and scholarly journals, and in The New York Times, the LA Review of Books, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, Bitch magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic and on NPR.