"The Italian immigrants in this exceptional debut collide and collapse in a polyphonic narrative that is part novel, part epic prose poem spanning the first half of the 20th century. Costanza Marini, a Cleveland widow who performs abortions of such a high grade that clinicians come take stock of her methods, has decided, among other aspirations, to save Lina, her young seamstress protégée and heiress, from spinsterhood. Intersecting sporadically with the machinations of Mrs. Marini during the sweltering feast of the Assumption is Rocco, the baker of the Italian community of Elephant Park, who is poised to leave his parochial Midwestern enclave for the first time to seek out his lost family. In doing so, he must face America and eventually ends up adrift near the Canadian border while looking for 'the New Jersey.' Rocco, whose fate, regrettably, is never explicated, inhabits (and narrates) the novel's radiant beginning and is emblematic of both Scibona's calibrated precision and the story's potent humanity. This ravenous prose offers its share of challenges, but Scibona's portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Scibona follows an elderly abortionist, an enigmatic drapery seamstress, a teenage boy, and a jeweler into the heart of a crime that will twist all their lives--against a background of immigration, broken loyalties, and racial hostility, set in 1953.

Salvatore Scibona’s fiction has been published in The Threepenny Review and the Pushcart Prize anthology. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the writing coordinator at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.