A Modern Trio in an Old Town

Eighteen-year-old Jane Jones boards a ship for Florence with nothing but her piano teacher's address and a churning belly. An unexpected chaperone has abandoned her in a foreign port. The city that awaits is no postcard - it's a crucible. At the Pension Dante, surrounded by artists and expatriates, Jane must learn to navigate not just Italian streets but her own uncertain place in the world. Old friends appear with new complications. The music she came to study becomes both her anchor and her question: who is she when she's far from everyone who knew her before? This is period fiction of quiet transformation, an early 20th-century portrait of a young woman casting off the familiar. For readers who savor the slow untangling of identity, who find pleasure in observing how a person learns to belong nowhere and everywhere at once.