Historical Fiction · An Italian Soul
The Parts
That Stay
Some places shape us.
Some moments stay with us forever.
Some places shape us.
Some moments stay with us forever.
Solara is a village in the Tuscan hills where everyone knows your name before you’ve earned it, and Giulia DeLuca is ten years old the summer the carpenter’s son moves in next door. What starts as a childhood friendship among the olive groves becomes the first of the questions that will shape her life — how to cross the distance to another person, and what it costs to stand at a door and fail to open it.
Over four decades and two continents, Giulia becomes many people: a girl who reads at the kitchen table, a scholarship student who crosses an ocean and lets America shorten her name to Julia, a translator who spends her life carrying meaning from one language into another. Through first loves and hard departures and the slow, costly work of becoming her own, she learns the difference between being seen and being known.
Framed by her return to her childhood home on her fiftieth birthday, The Parts That Stay is a luminous, deeply felt novel about memory, belonging, and the people who leave their mark on us long after they’re gone. It is the story of a woman coming all the way home — to a house, to a language, and at last to herself.
For readers of Elena Ferrante, Ann Patchett, and Kristin Hannah.
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Julia Bird writes historical fiction about human nature and the quiet distances between people — stories with an Italian soul, rooted in the hill towns where a life can be shaped by a single summer.
The Parts That Stay is the first book of The Parts, a multi-generational saga of one family across the Tuscan hills and beyond. She is at work on the next.