The End

A Novel

De: Salvatore Scibona

Narrado por: Jefferson Mays

This debut novel from Salvatore Scibona has garnered widespread praise as a literary triumph and was a National Book Award finalist.

A small, incongruous man receives an excruciating piece of news. His son has died in a POW camp in Korea. It is August 15, 1953, the day of a tumultuous street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant enclave in Ohio. The man is Rocco LaGrassa, and his many years of dogged labor, paternal devotion, and steadfast Christian faith are about to come to a crashing end. He is the first of many exquisitely drawn characters we meet that day, each of whom will come to their own conclusion.

The End follows an elderly abortionist, an enigmatic drapery seamstress, a teenage boy, a jeweler into the heart of a crime that will twist all their lives.

Against a background of immigration, broken loyalties, and racial hostility, we at last return to August 15, 1953, and see everything Rocco saw - and vastly more - through the eyes of various characters in the crowds.

The End is the unforgettable debut of a singular new American novelist.

©2008 Salvatore Scibona (P)2009 Recorded Books, LLC

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Exceptional debut...that is part novel, part epic prose poem...emblematic of both Scibona's calibrated precision and the story's potent humanity...a literary tour de force." ( Publishers Weekly)

"Breathtaking...Think not only Faulkner, but also T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce." ( Cleveland Plain Dealer)

"Like no other contemporary writer...A concordance of the immigrant experience from the beautiful to the brutal and everything in between." (ZZ Packer, author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere)

Strange book

A bit too self consciously cerebral for me at the expense of the story. Some interesting characters cleverly woven together but not quite engaging enough as a whole to keep it all together. Might be better in print than listening.