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by Frank X. Gaspar
As the last light of All-Hallows’ Eve falls on a small town at the tip of Cape Cod, Father Manuel Furtado begins his nightly ritual of gin and pills, prayer, and hours spent writing feverishly in his ledger. With the deep luxury of the chemicals in his body, he copies passages from Saint Augustine and Martin Heidegger, disciplined in his desire to flesh out his ever-building demons.
But, unlike his usual uninterrupted reflection, this night there is a crash, sudden enough to pull Father Manny from the rectory and toward his church, Our Lady of Fatima. He finds a man there — his childhood friend Sarafino, whom he has not seen in decades — frail with illness and desperate to tell the priest about his recurring visits from the Virgin Mary. Despite Father Manny’s grave doubts about Sarafino and his visions, he lets his old friend into his home and his life, and this single act ignites a series of events that challenge the faith of this fishing village, the parish, and of Father Manny himself.
"Starred Review. Gaspar, an award-winning poet and novelist (Leaving Pico), triumphs again with his unflinching portrait of doubt and devotion, demonstrating with skill and grace how the two forces simultaneously torment and uplift Fatima's parishioners." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. A brilliant foray beyond the usual limits of fiction." - Booklist
"Gaspar's masterful prose should absorb any reader intrigued by immigrant communities." - Publishers Weekly
"... Gaspar crafts an eloquent, emotionally resonant story that marries the richness of his ethnic characters to the literary affections of writers like John Irving." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about Stealing Fatima 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.
This is poet-novelist Gaspar's second novel following Leaving Pico.
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