Featured Author: Irene Wittig
A life shaped by stories, history, and the places we carry with us.
There are writers who imagine worlds, and writers who return to the ones that shaped them.
Today, we are honored to feature Irene Wittig, an author whose work is deeply rooted in memory, migration, and the fragile spaces where personal history meets collective history.
Born in Rome, raised in New York, shaped by studies in Germany, and a career that unfolded across Washington DC, Naples, and Geneva, Irene now lives in Virginia, but her stories continue to circle back to Vienna, the city whose echoes shaped her family’s past.
Her website, All That Lingers (https://all-that-lingers.com), is a beautiful archive of 20th-century Viennese history, offering insight into the culture, art, and human stories intertwined with her work.
📘 Featured Book: All That Lingers
Genre: Historical Fiction
Buy: Amazon | Books2Read
(Audiobook also available on InAudio, Google, Apple, and Amazon)
Set in Vienna between 1934 and 1960 — through civil war, the rise of Nazism, World War II, and postwar occupation — All That Lingers follows three interwoven lives reshaped by survival, silence, and impossible choices but also hope and resilience.
Emma, an ordinary young woman thrust into extraordinary times, protects her Jewish friends at great personal risk.
Sophie, returning years later, searches for the truth of her family’s past.
Friedrich, caught between conscience and self-preservation, makes decisions that ripple through generations.
It’s a story about humanity under pressure, the weight of secrets, and the complicated path toward healing after devastation.
🌱 What Inspired the Story
Irene’s mother was a half-Jewish Viennese woman who escaped to Italy, where Irene was born ten days before its liberation. Her grandmother escaped to New York, her grandfather survived the war in France, her uncle served in the U.S. Army, survived the war, only to be killed shortly afterwards. Her family’s stories and the many others Irene heard, growing up among World War II emigrants, were lessons in loss but also resilience.
In Emma, Irene imagined the life her Catholic grandmother might have lived had she stayed in Vienna.
This novel is both remembrance and re-creation: a way to honor the people, traditions, and histories that shaped her family.
Irene’s broader work is similarly woven with pieces of her life — from ceramic artistry learned in Italy, to personal experiences in Uganda, to playful moments with her granddaughter that became children’s stories.
Her writing is a testament to the idea that our lives are full of stories waiting to be honored.
🌐 Connect with Irene Wittig
Website: https://all-that-lingers.com
Books: Amazon | Books2Read
Audiobook: InAudio, Google, Apple, Amazon
