This is a novel of great depth, compassion and tenderness.

In a series of interconnected vignettes spanning 1909-77, Lippi breathes life into the village of Rosenau, an isolated dairy-farming community nestled in the Austrian Alps. Each chapter focuses on a segment of different women's lives, mainly: Anna, a young wife living in a household run by her mother-in-law, who receives a postcard from an outside man and sets the whole village talking; Johanna, a spinster living with her sister's family, who falls in love with an Italian deserter in her beloved alpine meadow and lives with the secret for the next 50 years; Angelika, Johanna's sister, who measures her own worth by the quality of the cheese she makes for her husband; and Katharina, who desperately wants to ride in one of the new automobiles of the Nazi soldiers. The simple lifestyle and Lippi's eloquent descriptions bring to life a world alien to the modern one yet brimming with emotions and events of universal understanding, evoking children's author Kate Seredy's Good Master and Singing Tree. An outstanding read. Melanie Duncan

A debut collection of 12 linked stories portraying the life of a small Austrian village and its inhabitants over the course of the 20th century. Rosenau is not the sort of place that you can expect to find on a map, let alone in many novels. A remote hamlet in the Alpine foothills of western Austria, it is ancient but not especially picturesque and would probably disappoint any tourist who happened across it. Nearly all of its people are farmers, farmers wives, and farmers children, and the few civic officials who reside there the priest, the schoolteacher, the postmistress, and so on deal with farmers all day long and become inevitably agrarian themselves. Externally uneventful, its an intensely domestic environment and most of its dramas occur within one household or another. Lippi understands and makes good use of the stories there, which occur among people who know or are related to everyone else and become marvelously cyclical and haunting. A lovers postcard addressed only to Anna Fink arrives in 1909, for example, and causes confusion because there are at least three women of that name in town. A lonely spinster working her brothers farm in 1916 gives shelter to an Italian deserter and is plagued by him after he leaves, while other women somehow have to survive the deaths or mutilations of their sons or husbands. In 1938, a Nazi medical functionary arrives in search of two retarded brothers, soon to be transferred to an institution elsewhere; the brothers are turned over to their deaths by their loving but ignorant [aunt]. Years later, the inhabitants find themselves hauntedsometimes literallyby those who died or disappeared at the front. Many of the women, unable to find a man to marry after the war, become sharp-eyed but wistful observers of the town and its lifeand narrators of its stories. Delicate and a trifle introspective, but very fine and moving. Lippi has a clear eye and a sharp tongue.

By the time you finish the first of these linked stories, you can hardly bear to have it end.