Julia Fine, Maddalena and The Dark

This will be an in-store event and live-streamed to Zoom, register to watch on Zoom here.

Copies of Maddalena and The Dark can be purchased from CW online here or by calling the store (505) 988-4226 - signed copies will be available after the event.

A Most Anticipated Book (LitHub, Bustle)

For fans of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and Mexican Gothic, a novel set in 18th-century Venice at a prestigious music school, about two girls drawn together by a dangerous wager. 

Venice, 1717. Fifteen-year-old Luisa has only wanted one thing: to be the best at violin. As a student at the Ospedale della Pietà, she hopes to join the highest ranks of its illustrious girls’ orchestra and become a protégé of the great Antonio Vivaldi. Luisa is good at violin, but she is not the best. She has peers, but she does not have friends. Until Maddalena.  After a scandal threatens her noble family’s reputation, Maddalena is sent to the Pietà to preserve her marriage prospects. When she meets Luisa, Maddalena feels the stirrings of a friendship unlike anything she has known. But Maddalena has a secret: she has hatched a dangerous plot to rescue her future her own way. When she invites Luisa into her plans, promising to make her dreams come true, Luisa doesn’t hesitate. But every wager has its price, and as the girls are drawn into the decadent world outside the Pietà’s walls, they must decide what it is they truly want—and what they will do to pay for it.  Lush and heady, swirling with music and magic, Maddalena and the Dark is a Venetian fairytale about the friendship between two girls and the boundless desire that will set them free, if it doesn’t consume them first.

 About the Author 

Julia Fine is the author of The Upstairs House, winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction; What Should Be Wild, which was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Superior First Novel Award; and Maddalena and the Dark. She teaches writing in Chicago, where she lives with her husband and children.