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

Book Synopsis

"Simmering with tension and urgent moral dilemmas . . . a satisfying family saga about the fraught but unbreakable bonds of love." --Foreword Reviews

In 1903 Barre, Vermont, granite is king--and it's killing the men who sculpt it.

While her father and brothers risk their lungs in the granite sheds and the town fractures over union strikes, twenty-year-old Rosina Bottinelli longs for a life shaped by her own hands. Determined not to be bound by marriage, she sets aside her artistic ambitions and turns to midwifery. Her apprenticeship to her formidable aunt reveals both the fierce power and the terrible cost of women's work.

But Barre is a tinderbox. A deadly lung disease--mal d'america--ravages the immigrant stonecutters. Labor unrest erupts into violence. And a bitter political rift between Rosina's unionist father and his capitalist brother threatens to shatter the family that crossed an ocean together.

As love and loyalty collide with ambition and belief, Rosina must decide what kind of life she will carve--and how long a shadow she is willing to cast.

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

"Simmering with tension and urgent moral dilemmas . . . a satisfying family saga about the fraught but unbreakable bonds of love." --Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews

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.