Julian Silva is a fourth -generation Portuguese -American whose Azorean ancestors first settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1870s. He was born in 1927 in san Lorenzo, which has served, with considerable license, as the model for the fictitious San Oriel.

The Gunnysack Castle was first published by Ohio University Press in 1983. A study of the character of Belle Bettencourt was published by Cosmopolitan Magazine in March 1964.
The second section of The Death of Mae Ramos, "Vasco and the Other," was originally published in 1979 under a different title and in a slightly different form in the University of Colorado's Writer's Forum 6.

Two discretely shaped yet interdependent narratives creating a family saga from the viewpoints of both maternal and paternal lines (a difficult and rarely successful strategy for fiction) comprise this large and capacious novel. Distant Music begins in the nineteenth-century and extends well into the twentieth, a diptych retelling the story of the Woods and Ramos families and their descents in rough-and-tumble California. In crisp, succinct, and often elegant prose, rich in deftly selected detail, Julian Silva celebrates not only the resilience of men and women confronted with failure but-even more important-he adumbrtes the compromised morality of their achievement.

George Monteiro
author of Robert Frost and the New England Renaissnace

Excerpt from the book
   - The Gunnysack Castle (click here)
   - The Death of Mae Ramos (click here)

2007 . 540 pages . Paper $20
ISBN 0-9722561-9-9

Praise for the The Gunnysack Castle by Julian SIlva

"The rise of an anglicized Portuguese is chronicled in a weaving of many strands-the immigrant experience, the place of women, the ambience of the noveau riche-that makes a voluptuous tapestry of life and a richly satisfying first novel...This is a compelling novel of Portuguese assimilation into the American mainstream."
-- Publisher's Weekly

"...the women in the book are complex, vulnerable, proud, silly and wise; in other words, they are real people and their lives and their stories are sffecting and memorable."
-- San Jose Mercury News

"A first novel with a ring of authenticity."
-- The Fresno Bee