Set in 1950s American and written in simple, beautiful prose, this is an award-winning novel about the ways in which tragedy can distort and interlink human lives.
On August 15, 1953, the day of a tumultuous street carnival in Elephant Park, Ohio, the baker Rocco LaGrassa receives a devastating piece of news: his son has died in a POW camp in Korea. Rocco's dogged life is transformed.
This unforgettable debut novel follows Rocco, an elderly abortionist, an enigmatic drapery seamstress, a teenage boy and a jeweller deep into the heart of a crime that will twist all of their lives.
Salvatore Scibona's first book, The End,was a finalist for the National Book Award; and winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library, and the Norman Mailer Cape Cod Award for Exceptional Writing. He was awarded a 2009 Whiting Writers' Award. In 2010, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was included in the New Yorker's '20 Under 40' list of writers to watch.
