What do we inherit, and what can we finally lay down?

"He removed his cross and came to me unburdened. We did not speak. It would have been unbearable." Luigia 1880

DONNA NUCCI

THE PENNY

Publication Date: MAY 2027

Thank you to my editor

Susanna Daniel for your unwavering commitment

to this project and honest feedback.

I highly recommend Susanna to every author.

https://www.susannadaniel.com/

A penny can be worth almost nothing—and still carry everything.

In 1910, seventeen-year-old Maddalena “Lena” leaves southern Italy pregnant, unmarried, and carrying a shame that was never hers. On the Naples dock, she finds a copper penny and takes it with her to America, where her family’s tradition of midwifery becomes a legacy of nursing and caregiving. Through generations of women, the coin passes alongside grief, forbidden love, sacrifice, and truths kept to protect the people they love.

Nearly a century later, Lena’s great-granddaughter Lisa Armstrong inherits the same instinct to preserve what might otherwise be lost. On September 9, 2001, she launches STRUCK, a voice-first matchmaking platform. Two days later, recordings meant to help strangers fall in love become irreplaceable traces of people who will never come home.

Years later, grief sends Lisa’s daughter Angelina back to Sant’Avellina with the penny and the writings of the women before her. There, she begins uncovering a forbidden love at the root of their family—and a history that changes what mother and daughter believe about the women who came before them.

Spanning seven generations, The Penny asks: How well can daughters ever know their mothers—and what might change if mothers finally told the stories their daughters never knew to ask?

What do we owe the women who came before us?

What stories live in our blood, waiting to be claimed?

What can we finally lay down?

MEET THE WOMEN

JOIN THE SACRED CIRCLE

The Penny is a debut literary novel about memory, silence, and the radical inheritance of women.

For readers of Pachinko, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and My Brilliant Friend.

MEET DONNA

I was inspired to write THE PENNY after losing my mother to dementia and after decades of work as a nurse witnessing how women’s lives, choices, and sacrifices are often absorbed quietly and left unnamed. Nursing trained me to listen not only to what is spoken, but to what is withheld, to the silences women carry around caregiving, desire, grief, and duty. This novel grew from lived proximity to loss and from observing how devotion, when unexamined, can become erasure.

My career has centered on listening to what people say, what they cannot say, and what is carried silently across generations. That practice of deep witnessing shapes the emotional architecture of THE PENNY.