Maria Liotta wants one thing: to read. In early twentieth-century Sicily, that's not a girl's place to want.

Sicily, 1897. Twelve-year-old Maria works for the powerful Abruzzi family, her hunger for a life of the mind refusing to die even as the world tells her it doesn't matter. When her grandfather dies and her father's silence grows unbearable, she and her mother cross the Atlantic to find him.

What they find in America is not what they imagined.

One of those discoveries is Baldassare Licata, a face Maria knows from home, newly released from a brutal labor camp in New York. What begins as recognition becomes something more. But building a life together in Brooklyn means navigating the Black Hand's shadow, and dangers the old country never prepared them for. New York itself becomes a threat, and they must choose between the life they have built and an uncertain road westward.

Based on the true story of the author's Sicilian family, The Scent of Lemons unfolds between 1897 and 1911.