Bio: Victoria Aracri DeRoche is a novelist, Reiki 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 writing study 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 Her first unpublished novel, Blue Hour, earned her the Michael Kenneth Smith Fellowship at The Porches.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 a spectacular granddaughter named Gia. 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’s cities smolder and loyalties fracture, one family’s legacy is on the verge of exposure. Bones of the Moth is a historical novel that traces three generations of the Vogel family through secrets, betrayals, and a reckoning that begins when a little girl witnesses the truth behind her grandmother’s death.
Set in postwar Heidelberg, the story follows Rebecca Vogel, an American expatriate married into a family complicit in Nazi war profiteering. When her mother-in-law dies under suspicious circumstances, Rebecca must choose between protecting her children and confronting the man she suspects is capable of murder—her father-in-law, Roland Vogel. As the OSS closes in on Roland’s black market operation, Rebecca’s husband returns from the front, and their youngest daughter, Dolores, begins exhibiting strange behaviors that point to an unspoken trauma. What unfolds is part gothic inheritance drama, part espionage puzzle, culminating in a quiet revenge years in the making.
Bones of the Moth will appeal to readers of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and Chris Bohjalian’s The Light in the Ruins—readers who value intimate human drama set against sweeping historical consequence. The novel explores postwar identity, moral cowardice, and how violence echoes through generations.