Daughters of Stone and Tide: Loss and Resilience in a Fisherman's Family, (Hardcover)

<p><b>A powerful family memoir about inheritance, identity, and the pull of the sea</b></p><p>Surrendered as an infant in America, Maria "Mia" was taken in by Sicilian immigrants in Gloucester, Massachusetts--a gritty working-class town steeped in salt and tradition. She inherits a name that traces back to 19th-century Sicily, where her great-grandfather was abandoned as a newborn on <i>la ruota dei proietti</i>, the "wheel of the castoffs." Christened Millefoglie, "a thousand leaves, a thousand pages," he crossed the bold Atlantic to America's shores, carrying with him a legacy of endurance and exile.</p><p>For generations, the Millefoglie men went to sea: dorymen who rose before dawn to cast their nets along jagged coastlines, captains of eastern-rig draggers navigating storms that could split a vessel in half, stowaways chasing the promise of a life they could scarcely imagine. They lived by tides, currents, and the unspoken rules of the ocean; their courage and skill tested daily by wind and water. The women, left on shore, learned a different kind of survival, keeping households, raising children, and enduring the constant absence of fathers, brothers, and husbands. </p><p>Into this world of fishermen and keepers of the shore, Mia was adopted, learning early that bloodlines dictate identity and tradition shapes fate. College is forbidden; marriages are arranged, and no one abandons the family. By nineteen, trapped in a fish-packing job and lost in a haze of drugs, Mia does the unthinkable: she leaves. Decades later, drawn back to Gloucester's weathered harbor to care for her aging parents, Mia begins to unearth her family's buried stories, tracing the lineage from a Sicilian orphanage to a New England fishing port and the invisible inheritance that shaped them all. </p><p>Both intimate and historical, <i>Daughters of Stone and Tide</i> is a meditation on identity, abandonment, and belonging--a fisherman's daughter's search to understand the forces that bind and break a family across generations and seas.</p>

• Daughters of Stone and Tide: Loss and Resilience in a Fisherman's Family, (Hardcover)
• Author: Bright Leaf
• ISBN: 9781625349576
• Format: Hardcover
• Publication Date: 2026-09-08
• Page Count: 288