'The suitcase is old. I can't tell what colour it originally was because the checked pattern on the sides has faded so much. The handle is leather and curves like a small banana; the clasps are rusted and stick. As a child I often sneaked out to the shed and touched the suitcase, like it was a magic talisman, ran my fingers along its bumpy skin feeling for its secrets. The dusty smell of it made me cry for a land I hadn't seen, a language I couldn't speak, a person I couldn't be.'
The ingredients of Grace Sabato's life are an extraordinary mixture of love, magic, music and myth . . . and food, always food. Her childhood senses are infused with the pungent odours of garlic, espresso and baccala, a grandmother's bizarre rituals of blood and tears, the joy in her uncle's eyes and words, the resonant melodies of another language that speaks into her soul, images of a land where she has never lived but longs desperately to know. Packing a suitcase that once carried the hopes of another far from home, she sets out on a pilgrimage of the heart to weave the strands of her heritage, and of her self.
