How Long a Shadow - by Cheryl a Ossola (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Set in 1903 Barre, Vermont, How Long a Shadow is a richly researched historical novel rooted in the immigrant labor movement of the American granite industry. As mal d' america devastates stonecutters and union strikes divide the town, twenty-year-old Rosina Bottinelli seeks a life beyond the narrow expectations of marriage. Apprenticing as a midwife, she confronts the physical and moral stakes of women's work while a growing political rift between her unionist father and his capitalist brother threatens to fracture her family.Against a backdrop of labor unrest, public health crisis, and early suffrage activism, Rosina must decide where she stands-- and what it will cost her to step out of the shadows and shape her own future.

Review Quotes

"You can smell the stone dust in this richly imagined and deeply researched book. How Long a Shadow evokes a long-ago but still deeply resonant world rife with discrimination, bitter labor disputes, and hotly contested questions about a woman's place in society. Brava!" --Michael David Lukas, author of The Oracle of Stamboul and The Last Watchman of Old Cairo

"Intimate and sweeping, How Long a Shadow is a powerful historical novel of immigrant life, family loyalty, and hard-won female awakening." --Judith Turner-Yamamoto, author of Loving the Dead and Gone

"Ossola is a writer of extraordinary empathy and precision. . . . How Long a Shadow swept me into a world I didn't want to leave." --Daniela Petrova, author of Her Daughter's Mother

"I loved these people so much; I was truly sorry when I turned the last page . . . unforgettable." --Stephanie Cowell, author of The Man in the Stone Cottage and Claude & Camille, American Book Award winner

"Ossola masterfully makes the reader feel the anguish of love and death, choke on the dust of cut granite, smell the sweat of men fighting on the picket line . . ." --Steven Mayfield, author of The Penny Mansions and Treasure of the Blue Whale

"How Long a Shadow is a love letter to all the ways we make art, seen and unseen." --Marco Rafalà, author of How Fires End

About the Author

Cheryl A. Ossola is a second-generation Italian American and a descendant of the stonecutters who shaped Barre, Vermont's, granite industry. Her fiction and poetry explore Italian heritage, art, labor history, and the immigrant experience. She is the author of the novel The Wild Impossibility (2019), and her work has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Writer's Digest, Switchback, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, and Eastern Iowa Review: Best Prose Poetry 2025. A former editor and freelance writer with an MFA from the University of San Francisco, she writes Italicus: a writer's life in Italy from a hilltop town in Umbria.