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by William Boyle
As an Italian American family's decades-old secret begins to unravel, they will have to bear the consequences—and face each other—in this thrilling southern Brooklyn-set tragic opera of the highest caliber from crime fiction luminary William Boyle.
William Boyle is the master of Brooklyn-set crime fiction and Saint of the Narrows Street is his magnum opus. For fans of The Sopranos, Jonathan Lethem, and Dennis Lehane.
Gravesend, Brooklyn, 1986: Risa Franzone lives in a ground-floor apartment on Saint of the Narrows Street with her bad-seed husband, Saverio, and their eight-month-old baby, Fabrizio. On the night Risa's younger sister, Giulia, moves in to recover from a bad breakup, a fateful accident occurs: Risa, boiled over with anger and fear, strikes a drunk, erratic Sav with a cast-iron pan, killing him on the spot.
The sisters are left with a choice: notify the authorities and make a case for self-defense, or bury the man's body and go on with their lives as best they can. In a moment of panic, in the late hours of the night, they call upon Sav's childhood friend—the sweet, loyal Christopher "Chooch" Gardini—to help them, hoping they can trust him to carry a secret like this.
Over the vast expanse of the next eighteen years, life goes on in the working-class Italian neighborhood of Gravesend as Risa, Giulia, Chooch, and eventually Fabrizio grapple with what happened that night. A standout work of character-driven crime fiction from a celebrated author of the form, Saint of the Narrows Street is a searing and richly drawn novel about the choices we make and how they shape our lives.
"Boyle structures the sprawling tale like a Greek tragedy, mining potent themes of legacy and class with such force and empathy that readers may come to think of him as the Balzac of Brooklyn. It's a stunning achievement." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An established noir master, Boyle outdoes himself in crafting a novel of deep dimensions marked by intergenerational trauma, family strife, and failed religion ... A great, gravely unsettling novel that welcomes repeated readings." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The stunning Saint of the Narrows Street is William Boyle's best novel yet, a vibrant, operatic tale of two resilient, big-hearted sisters and the fateful night that sets their life on a path they never intended. Not since Richard Price has a writer brought New York to such vivid, spectacular life, and Boyle's southern Brooklyn is all his own: a neighborhood pulsing with hard-earned humor, dive-bar pleasures and thunderous heartbreak." —Megan Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of Beware the Woman
"No one can make the everyday vagaries of life feel like Greek tragedies the way William Boyle can. He effortlessly maps the path of desire that moves through the human heart like burning chrome." —S.A. Cosby, New York Times bestselling author of All the Sinners Bleed
This information about Saint of the Narrows Street was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
William Boyle is the author of eight books set in the southern Brooklyn neighborhood where he was born and raised, including his debut, Gravesend; the story collection Death Don't Have No Mercy; The Lonely Witness, nominated for the Hammett Prize; A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, an Amazon Best Book of 2019; City of Margins, a Washington Post Best Thriller and Mystery Book of 2020; and Shoot the Moonlight Out, listed by CrimeReads as one of the ten best noir novels of 2021. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
My Darling Boy by John Dufresne
The story of of a man whose son collapses into addiction and vanishes into the chaotic netherworld of southern Florida.
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