Books
Drew Banks’s Elba Trilogy—Able Was I, Ere I Saw Elba, and I Before E—is a multigenerational literary fiction series set between New York, París, and across Italy, and exploring themes of identity, exile, and chosen family.
On February 1, 2000, atop a rooftop terrace overlooking Rome, Grey Tigrett hosts a 50th birthday celebration for the mother of Paolo Viglietti — a young Italian-American man he befriended during an unexpected detour of his cruise ship to the island of Elba.
Suspicious of Grey’s generosity, Maria’s lifelong friend, Brigitte Crémieux, leaves Elba for only the second time in her adult life to attend the party. But her concern for Maria and Paolo is eclipsed when she arrives and is greeted by the party’s surprise guests.
Across the three novels, Drew Banks traces the intertwined backstories of Grey, Brigitte, and Paolo — exposing the pivotal events that brought them to this fated night, when each must confront the singular core belief that has shaped their life.
This genre-blending trilogy will captivate readers who enjoy LGBTQ+ literature, coming-of-age journeys, historical fiction, family drama, romance, mysteries, European settings, and evocative “armchair travel” storytelling.
I Before E
The third novel in the Elba trilogy, I Before E tells the story of Paolo Viglietti, a young Italian-American immigrant whose desperate struggle to understand his father’s drowning triggers a turbulent coming of age—one that ultimately leads him back to Italy to confront the family mysteries he's grappled with his entire life.
Set between 1986 and 2000, I Before E follows Paolo's journey from his suffocating childhood in Little Italy (New York City), to his teenage liberation in the West Village, to his college escape to UC Berkeley, and finally to his return to Italy and search for answers in Rome, Padua, and his hometown of Portoferraio, Elba.
Though I Before E stands alone as an independent novel, readers of Able Was I and Ere I Saw Elba will recognize familiar faces as the threads of the trilogy weave together to explore themes of childhood trauma, exile, and forgiveness.
Ere I Saw Elba
1944, Paris. Following 9-year-old Brigitte Sureau's release from a Nazi internment camp, the reunited Sureaus become France's postwar standard for reconciliation. This notoriety veils the family's quiet disintegration, leading to Brigitte’s lifelong exile on the Italian island of Elba. Fifty years later, a chance encounter in Rome exposes fact from fiction forcing Brigitte to reconsider the single decision that shaped her life.
The second in Banks’s Elba trilogy, Ere I Saw Elba explores the lasting impact of childhood trauma that is often compounded by the coping strategies we use to suppress the memory of that trauma.
Able Was I
In the summer of 1985, on a post-collegiate adventure to Europe, Grey Tigrett’s meticulously planned trip is derailed by an argument with an uninvited guest who threatens to ruin the trip. On the subsequent ferry ride to an unplanned destination, he waxes poetically in his journal to calm himself down.
"Before I saw Elba, there was nothing but sea and sky. Then it appeared, small on the horizon, an insignificant fleck just below the vanishing point. On the water, perspectives are not forged from hard angles. No perfect square is centered upon the edge of the sea. The imminence is the same, yet the path, variable. Nascent and amorphous, the island bobs up, down, right and left as the boat stays its course."
Fourteen years later, Grey Tigrett is still adrift. To escape the emotional impotency of both his past and present, he has again retreated to the exile of his dreamy, analytic mind. On the eve of the new millennium, three pivotal events shatter Grey's asylum and lead him to discover whether his life-altering experiences on Elba were his downfall or will be what finally sets him free.
Able Was I is not a typical LGBTQ+ coming-of-age novel, rather it explores the lifelong yearning to relive the intensity of one’s coming of age and recapture the possibility lost in the years since.