Everyone knows Casanova. Almost no one remembers the woman who shaped his life.
Venice, 1723. Hours after her father disowns her, sixteen-year-old Zanetta Farussi steps onto the stage and begins the life her family feared most.
Over the next decade, she rises to fame as La Buranella - acclaimed, visible, and always one unpaid bill away from ruin. But applause cannot feed children, and reputation cannot protect a woman with too many mouths to shelter and too few choices. Faced with the brutal arithmetic of survival, Zanetta must make an impossible decision: to feed her six children, she must leave them; to stay, she must watch them starve.
Bohemia, 1789. Her son Giacomo Casanova - sixty-four, exiled, and fading into obscurity - tries to begin his memoirs and discovers a wound deeper than disgrace: he cannot truly remember his mother. When traces of her theatrical past surface in a foreign castle's archives, he begins an investigation that leads him toward the woman history forgot - and toward the silence he inherited from her.
Moving between the Venetian stage and Casanova's final exile, A Woman Named Zanetta: The Silent Stage restores dignity, depth, and consequence to Zanetta Farussi, the actress, mother, and survivor too often reduced to a footnote in her son's legend.
Two lives. Two exiles. One silence passed from mother to son across half a century.
A Woman Named Zanetta: The Silent Stage is the first volume in a historical novel series for readers of Hilary Mantel, John Williams, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
