Bio: Victoria Aracri DeRoche is a novelist, Reiki /sound bowl practitioner, and former restaurateur whose work explores the psychic undercurrents of memory, trauma, and feminine truth. Her writing is shaped by a decade in the food service industry and a life-changing period of inner excavation that began when her restaurant, Nota Bene, closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
What started as personal writing became something deeper—an act of remembering, releasing, and reclaiming. During this time, Victoria was diagnosed with Waldenstrom Macroglobinemia, a rare blood cancer. Undergoing treatment gave her clarity, urgency, and an unwavering commitment to her voice.
She began formal study of writing in 2020, taking classes with Matt Cricchio and short-fiction workshops with Susan Hankla at the VMFA Studio School. Her first unpublished novel, Blue Hour, earned her the Michael Kenneth Smith Fellowship at The Porches. She continues to write and revise with her long-standing writing group.
Victoria lives in Richmond, Virginia, where she has resided since 1989, surrounded by her two adult children, their partners, her husband, and grandchildren Gia and Rocco. When not writing, she can be found cooking, gardening, entertaining, meditating, or walking with her Goldendoodle, Ruben. She practices Reiki on those she loves—including her three cats—and believes in the quiet power of energy, storytelling, and grace.
Her debut novel, Bones of the Moth, is a literary meditation on silence, survival, and the invisible legacies passed down through blood and bone.
In the waning days of World War II, as Germany collapses and loyalties fracture, one powerful family’s legacy is on the verge of exposure.
Bones of the Moth is a literary historical suspense novel set in postwar Heidelberg, where silence has become its own form of survival. Rebecca Vogel, an American expatriate married into a wealthy German family, suspects her father-in-law—a respected industrialist with ties to Nazi war profiteering—may have murdered his wife to protect the secrets buried within the household.
As the OSS closes in on Roland Vogel’s black-market operation, Rebecca’s husband returns home from the war carrying wounds of his own, while their youngest daughter, Dolores, begins exhibiting strange behaviors after witnessing something she cannot fully name. When the child’s fractured memories begin surfacing, the family’s carefully constructed mythology starts to unravel.
Blending gothic inheritance drama with psychological suspense and postwar espionage, Bones of the Moth explores moral cowardice, generational silence, and the quiet violence families commit in the name of survival.
The novel will appeal to readers of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and Chris Bohjalian’s The Light in the Ruins—readers drawn to intimate human drama set against sweeping historical consequence.