Book excerpt: SHIPWRECK OF HOPES sweeps the reader from a desolate island beach in America, across the Atlantic to war-torn Italy to tell a story of shipwreck, deception, thievery, and murder on treacherous seas, in bloody revolution, and on an isolated shore. Place, time, memory and dream are woven together to tell the stories of two women who risk everything in their quests to control their own destinies. Drawing inventively on the lives that converged with the fate of the ship Elizabeth in 1850, the novel reveals the harrowing journeys of those involved on that desperate day