Caccamo, Sicily, 1913. In the blue hour before dawn, a six-year-old boy named Giuseppe is taken to the village bakery, where the old baker presses a worn wooden rosary into his hands and gives him a charge far heavier than he can understand: keep it safe. On the ship. In America. Every mile. Not your mother. Not the priest. You.
So begins the crossing of a lifetime. The Beads He Carried follows one Sicilian family from the stone streets of Caccamo across the Atlantic in steerage to Ellis Island and the immigrant wards of a new country — the hunger and the hope, the faith carried in a pocket, and the debts and blessings handed down a generation at a time.
Based on real family history and told with warmth, humor, and the tenderness of a storyteller reaching back across a hundred years, The Beads He Carried is a novel about what we carry when we can carry almost nothing — and what it costs, and what it saves, to keep a promise all the way to the far side of the world.
Coming September 2026 (tentative). A companion to the memoir One Woman’s View — the family story, imagined from the inside. Join the readers’ list to hear the moment it’s ready.
A novel by Donna Matthews · Cassaro Publishing
ISBNs 978-1-0667953-0-7 and 978-1-0667953-1-4
Donna Matthews 