The End - Salvatore Scibona
The immigrant story is at the center of Salvatore Scibona’s debut novel The End (Graywolf, $24), set in an Italian neighborhood in 1950s Cleveland. There’s Rocco, a baker, who has lost his family to prosperity elsewhere; Enzo, whose wife leaves him and his son Ciccio for no reason he can discern; Lina, that fleeing wife, the girl whose future the widow, Mrs. Marini, tried to assure; and Mrs. Marini, who left her village for America in 1915, an act she believes God has not forgiven her for. But Scibona’s novel—a National Book Award finalist—is less about leaving home than about what happens afterward. Each character harbors secrets and is forced to confront a changing America that, while willing to include them, is also reinforcing barriers as the civil rights movement looms. In The End, Scibona portrays the confluence of chance and circumstance and how those forces pull at the seams of communities.
