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Also by Pamela Schoenewaldt:

Under The Same Blue Sky, May 2015
Paperback
When We Were Strangers, February 2011
Paperback / e-Book

WHEN WE WERE STRANGERS
By: Pamela Schoenewaldt

A Novel

HarperCollins
February 2011
On Sale: January 25, 2011
Featuring: Irma Vitale
289 pages
ISBN: 0062003992
EAN: 9780062003997
Kindle: B004CFA9Q4
Paperback / e-Book
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Women's Fiction Historical

“If you leave Opi, you’ll die with strangers,” Irma Vitale’s mother always warned. But Irma is too poor and too plain to marry and can’t find honest work her tiny mountain village in Southern Italy. Barely twenty, she must leave home bearing only native wit and astonishing skill with a needle. Risking rough passage across the Atlantic, a single woman in a strange land, Irma seeks a new life sewing dresses for gentlewomen.

Swept up in the crowded streets of nineteenth-century America, Irma finds workshop servitude and miserable wages, but also seeds of friendship in the raw immigrant quarters. When her determination leads at last to Chicago, Irma blossoms under the hand of an austere Alsatian dressmaker, sewing fabrics and patterns more beautiful than she’d ever imagined. Then this tenuous peace is shattered. From the rubble, confronting human cruelty and kindness, suffering and hope, a new Irma emerges, nurturing a talent she’d never imagined and an unlikely family, patched together by the common threads that unite us all.