A Novel · Allegro Assai Press · 2026
Fefè
A Sicilian-American Journey
Photo: finelystrung.com
A Sicilian-American Journey
Photo: finelystrung.com
A Sicilian-American Journey
“A Sicilian-American concert pianist searches for a boy in an old photo to find the life he almost lived.”
Fefè arrives in America with Sicily still inside him: the sea, the family traditions, the taste of fennel, fish, and bread. He meets Lena — brilliant, American, powerful, a woman at the center of her family relationships. Their marriage carries Alfredo from the Upper West Side to the Berkshires, from Sicily to London, through concerts, meals, friendships, rivalries, and the intimate politics of family.
Fefè is a novel of travel and return: Sicily with its heat and memory, London with its fog and traditions, the Upper West Side with its liberal ideas and rituals, and the Berkshires with its summer festivals. It is also a sensual novel — of meals remembered, shared, and withheld. Food becomes language. Music becomes memory. Love becomes something harder to define.
Woven through the book is a soundtrack the reader can listen to as they read: classical piano as the emotional accompaniment of Alfredo’s life. The music does not decorate; it carries the story.
At sixty, Alfredo finds himself drawn toward a younger Polish artist whose presence unsettles the life he has so carefully built. Over the years that follow, his marriage, his daughter, his past, and even Sicily itself begin to change shape. What once felt like inheritance becomes mystery. What once felt secure begins to recede.
Fefè is the story of a man who has commanded the room his entire life and must finally ask what it has cost him. It is a novel of family, food, music, and desire — and the strange way a life can belong to many places and still leave a person searching for home.
In 1971, James Abruzzo took a photograph on a trip to Sicily. Nine boys stood on the stone steps of the Monumento ai Caduti Italiani d’Africa — a Fascist-era war memorial in Siracusa. One of them, the boy on the far right who stands slightly apart from the others, stayed with him.
Decades later, that boy became Samiro — a character in Fefè, a violinist whose life intersects with Alfredo’s at the Politeama in Palermo. The photograph is not just the cover of this novel. It is its origin.
Abruzzo has written a novel where the music uplifts you, the food nourishes you, and the people feel so alive you find yourself wondering where they go when you close the book.
Among the highlights is the frequent, intimate, almost sensual relationship the protagonist has with music and the piano. Abruzzo cleverly evokes this passion while, over time, also the suffering that comes from such a focus at the expense of all else. This is a book I highly recommend.
How passionately and powerfully you spoke about music and then visual art. The characters in the book are rich and real and their relationships feel believable — the sense of time and the passage of the complications of life through several generations.
More reviews coming. Have you read Fefè? Leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon.
James Abruzzo
James Abruzzo began his career as a classical pianist. What he learned shaped everything that followed. He has worked for more than four decades at the center of the world’s great cultural institutions, advising orchestras, museums, and ballet companies across Europe and the Americas on leadership, governance, and the decisions that determine whether an institution endures. He was the co-founder of the Institute for Ethical Leadership at Rutgers Business School and held graduate faculty positions at Columbia, Bocconi, and the Free University of Berlin. He knows what it costs artists to dedicate a life to something larger than themselves. Fefè is his first novel.
More about James →