Book Two of The Parts · Out December 31, 2026
The Parts
We Lose
A decade lived out of sight —
and everything she gave up to keep it.
A decade lived out of sight —
and everything she gave up to keep it.
Isabella Rossi left Solara at twenty-one for Milan, in the last years before the war, and came home ten years later with a photograph and nothing else. Her family never asked. She never said.
For sixty years she has been the aunt at the top of the hill — the one who asks nothing of you, who taught one niece to leave and another to keep a true account, and who has never once told either of them why.
Now she is ninety, and one of those nieces has brought a notebook.
What Isabella tells her is the story of a decade lived entirely out of sight — a city, a firm, a discretion so total it became a way of being — and of everything she chose to give up in order to keep it. A novel about the parts of a life we lose, the parts we choose to lose, and what we hand down to the women who come after us.
For readers of Elena Ferrante, Ann Patchett, and Kristin Hannah.
You already know Isabella — the aunt at the quiet edge of Giulia’s story, the one who seemed to have made a kind of peace no one could quite read. The Parts We Lose is hers: the life behind the stillness.
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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 We Lose is the second book of The Parts, a multi-generational saga of one family across the Tuscan hills and beyond.