Across the Arno (THE OLTRARNO PASSAGES Book 1)

Graham Tierney has spent thirty years writing the Oltrarno series—sweeping historical romances set in Renaissance Florence that have earned him critical acclaim, a devoted readership, and a Hollywood option. But since losing Simon, his husband of three decades, Graham hasn’t written a word. He’s been sitting alone in his Maine cottage, waiting for something he can’t name.

It’s Eli who finds him first. Sharp-tongued, fiercely loyal, and waiting at a bus stop in the December cold, Eli is a young man with hearing loss who works as an accountant—and who happens to be Graham’s biggest fan. What begins as an unlikely friendship becomes something deeper: a bond that fills the spaces both have been missing. For Eli, Graham fills a space his own father never could. And Eli, without meaning to, teaches Graham how to live again.

When Graham’s seventeen-year-old nephew Michael arrives for Christmas—a high school senior quietly wrestling with who he is and what he wants from life—the circle widens. There’s Susan, a single mother rebuilding after homelessness, and her son Levi, who sees the world differently than most. As unlikely connections form, Eli becomes a steady, mentoring presence for them all—the right person, at the right time, saying the things they need to hear.

Woven throughout is the Oltrarno series itself—passages from Graham’s novels about Marco and Alessandro, two young men in fifteenth-century Florence whose love story began thirty years ago on the page and now seems to be unfolding again in the lives around him. As Graham watches them—each searching for home, for belonging, for permission to be who they are—he begins to understand that the story he started writing all those years ago was never just fiction. And now, searching for a way to write the final book, he realizes that some stories don’t end. They just find new ways to continue.

Across the Arno is a novel about invisible loneliness and unexpected family. About the courage it takes to say who you are. About the people who see us before we can see ourselves.

And about giving yourself permission to remain hopeful