The War Ends At Four

REGAL HOUSE PUBLISHING

An Italian acupuncturist in Minneapolis comes to terms with the Italy she left behind and the America she found in the novel about love, home, and the strength that one woman finds to fight for what she wants

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The War Ends At Four explores the quest of a perpetual outsider looking for a true home while coming to terms with the Italy she left behind and the America she found. Renata, an Italian acupuncturist in Minneapolis, falls madly in love with a charismatic actor. Once married, she discovers his passion is not focused on her alone. With her marriage and her small acupuncture clinic in crisis, she is called to her father's deathbed in Milan. There Renata again faces the slights she suffered in childhood as the daughter of an immigrant from Naples. Gripped by grief and anxiety over her future, she discovers that her father, a survivor of WWII, believed until the end in risk-taking as a life-affirming necessity. With newfound courage, Renata stumbles into the lure of an old love and the magic of a new one. Her final action surprises even herself.

Awards and Recognition

Praise For The War Ends At Four

In prose elegant and sensuous, Rosanna Staffa brings robustly to life Renata, an acupuncturist in Minneapolis, who returns home to Milan to see her dying father. As this novel richly unfolds, her journey also becomes one of memory and matters of the heart. Sensitive, yearning, and hopeful, Renata is caught between “venturing into the wilderness” and “driven by a longing to belong.” As a vibrant Milan opens before us, with family tales and love stories, we see a woman daring to be joyful and, traveling through her past, finding a way to become new.  
—Roy Hoffman, author of The Promise of the Pelican

In her first novel, The War Ends at Four, Rosanna Staffa writes with elegance and conviction of the darker sides of life — the pain of loss and regret, the finality of death and of roads not taken — but her true gift as a writer shines in the warmth and agility of her prose, the desire and passions of her characters, and the hope that exudes from these fluid and nimble pages. This is a novel that grabs your heart in unexpected ways — one that can take your breath away like a strong shot of grappa, yet demands to be savored like a fine Brunello di Montalcino. Escaping into this story was, like a longed-for trip to Italy, a once in a lifetime experience that will challenge your expectations of how far a novel can transport you and illuminate your understanding of what another person’s story can teach you about your own. Magnifica!
—Rachel M. Harper, author of The Other Mother and This Side of Providence

"It’s hard to say which comes more to sparkling life in Rosanna Staffa’s magnificent debut: the rich cast of characters, or the city of Milan they inhabit. Papoozi, Tito, Renata, you’ll feel you’ve lived and lost with them, and been found again. Their lives are beautiful, heartbreaking, unforgettable. The entire novel is. You won’t be able to put it down once you pick it up, so plan accordingly. And look for more brightness from this rising star. I’m already impatient."
—Peter Geye, author of The Ski Jumpers

"This is an extraordinary novel of glance and gesture--one of the finest I've ever read. How to know your essential self? How to know that of another? If you're a galloping reader, Horseman, pass by. Here, a warm eye is cast on the mille-seconds of feeling and meaning--the real stuff of life. Stay, read on: All your senses, attention itself, will be enriched."
—Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife; Four Spirits; The Fountain of St. James Court, or Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

“There is a burnished glow to Rosanna Staffa’s gorgeous first novel, The War Ends at Four, which has the singularity of a fingerprint: no one else could have written it. But like Elizabeth Hardwick in her great novel Sleepless Nights (first published in 1979), Staffa’s writing has the luminous quality of a sensibility forged by time and experience, thought and feeling. Witness these two passages: 'Like the abstract art she would grow fond of, Chinese medicine was a representation of the world the way she experienced it and was unable to define, so fluid in its design that a new vocabulary was needed.' 'Her solitude in the house so fully absorbed her that once she started to sense her presence fading, like photosensitive paper exposed to light.' Staffa’s prose is so packed with insight, delight, and—dare I say it?—wisdom; her metaphors, syntax, and word choices are so right, that one almost holds one’s breath as one reads, waiting for a wrong move. Exhale, reader; it never happens. This is a bravura performance.”
—Robin Lippincott, author of Blue Territory: A Meditation on the Life and Art of Joan Mitchell

"Rosanna Staffa’s captivating novel, The War Ends at Four, is so fine, the language so startlingly fresh, bursting as it is with such dead-on accuracy and humor. The joy—and suspense—of turning these pages is to encounter life at its most spirited and unexpected. The enticement, too, is in the deeper, quieter folds of the story, where time flickers seamlessly between past and present. The book is powered by an intelligence deep and brave enough to face the full range of what life delivers. The War Ends at Four will make you glad to be alive, thankful to notice human quirks, small tendernesses, to feel the heat of longing and desire between lovers, to wonder at the vivacity and richness of memory."
—Eleanor Morse, author of White Dog Fell from the Sky and Margreete’s Harbor Playwright

"Rosanna Staffa has written a luminous novel in The War Ends at Four. Acupuncturist Renata leaves behind her Minneapolis clinic and a faltering marriage when her brother, Tito, calls from Milan to say that their father, Papoozi, is dying. Memories of childhood unfold for Renata as the airplane hits the tarmac in Italy. Staffa writes about children, memory, love, and the words not spoken in a family in a magical way. She is an extraordinary writer."
—Maureen Millea Smith, author of The Enigma of Iris Murphy and When Charlotte Comes Home

What’s that they say about going home again? In The War Ends at Four, Rosanna Staffa raises the question afresh, with an intriguing Italian lilt. Over a few jet-lagged and feeling-full days in Milan, the protagonist Renata feels roots coming loose from San Francisco to Napoli. This starts as soon as the Old Country calls her back— a family crisis— and before long she confronts similar identity shifts in everyone close to her. At dinner, the meal may be sumptuous, but the table seems to tremble. Yet amid all the turmoil, Renata finds ways to keep her feet, a plucky new heroine of the Italian diaspora.
—John Domini, author of The Color Inside a Melon

“What a beautifully complex novel about reaching out and letting go, about the blurry borders between past and present. In Staffa’s generous voice, Milan becomes the reader’s home, Renata our closest friend.” —James Tate Hill, author of Blind Man’s Bluff