City of Margins
by William Boyle
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Pub Date 24 Sep 2020 | Archive Date 21 Sep 2020
Oldcastle Books | No Exit Press
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Description
In City of Margins, the lives of several lost souls intersect in Southern Brooklyn in the early 1990s. There’s Donnie Parascandolo, a disgraced ex-cop with blood on his hands; Ava Bifulco, a widow whose daily work grind is her whole life; Nick, Ava’s son, a grubby high school teacher who dreams of a shortcut to success; Mikey Baldini, a college dropout who’s returned to the old neighborhood, purposeless and drifting; Donna Rotante, Donnie’s ex-wife, still reeling from the suicide of their teenage son; Mikey’s mother, Rosemarie, also a widow, who hopes Mikey won’t fall into the trap of strong arm work; and Antonina Divino, a high school girl with designs on breaking free from Brooklyn. Uniting them are the dead: Mikey’s old man, killed over a gambling debt, and Donnie and Donna’s poor son, Gabe.
These characters cross paths in unexpected ways, guided by coincidence and the pull of blood. There are new things to be found in the rubble of their lives, too. The promise of something different beyond the barriers that have been set out for them. This is a story of revenge and retribution, of facing down the ghosts of the past, of untold desires, of yearning and forgiveness and synchronicity, of the great distance of lives lived in dangerous proximity to each other. City of Margins is a Technicolor noir melodrama pieced together in broken glass.
Advance Praise
"Boyle has quietly proven he can take on any number of kinds of crime fiction, from a screwball farce to a hardboiled noir to a heartfelt examination of lonely people whose lives cross" - Crime Reads
"Boyle studies Donnie and his neighbours with a mixture of affection and despair worthy of a Bruce Springsteen song. He has a real thing for working-class folks. People like this, they need people like Boyle" - New York Times Book Review
"In his fourth novel since his stunning debut, Gravesend, the grandly talented Boyle is still in the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up. He knows the music of the Italian American voices, from punk to bar stool to operatic, like nobody else: Mob goons, college dropouts, melancholy widows and pink-haired rockers mix it up in this deliciously convoluted tale that reads like a fresh new season of The Sopranos" - WASHINGTON POST
"Outstanding. Battered by loss and unrealized dreams, Boyle’s characters are vividly drawn and painfully real. Fans of literary crime novelists such as George Pelecanos and Richard Price will be highly rewarded" -Publishers Weekly
"Boyle’s latest is another slice of gritty urban noir. The author’s exquisitely drawn characters soon uncover secrets and make connections with each other that echo those of a Greek tragedy, with similar results Boyle comfortably stands next to literary crime favourites like Don Winslow, Richard Price, and Lou Berney" - Library Journal
"A dark but moving portrayal of working-class lives that evokes the ‘kitchen-sink dramas’ of such mid-century British novelists as Alan Sillitoe. Eschewing sentimentality yet still managing to find embers of tenderness in these stunted lives, Boyle blends powerful social realism with a strong noir sensibility" - Booklist
"A precious gem of a crime novel Boyle is in top form, delivering a work that had me thinking about Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River and, thanks to Boyle’s dark, knowing humour, the work of New Yorkers like Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin" - Mystery Scene
"A marvelously nuanced study of light and dark. The arts bridge generations, start conversations and, in Boyle's masterful hands, provide softening, wide-angle lenses to the broken and tortured souls of the margins" - Shelf Awareness
"A funny, gritty, touching narrative about the strength of three New York women caught in a world of abusive men, broken families, and mob violence. Crime fiction usually stays within the confines of the genre, but Boyle breaks away from those restrictions" - NPR
"A brilliant and nasty piece of joyful ambiguity that I Ioved deeply. What a marvellous and unexpected bunch of female characters, in particular. With this one, William Boyle vaults into the big time, or he damn sure should" - Joe R Lansdale, author of the Hap & Leonard series
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9780857304056 |
| PRICE | £8.99 (GBP) |
Featured Reviews
Sam A, Media/Journalist
Feeling like a lost series of The Sopranos, re-edited using A Song Of Ice and Fire’s structure, City Of Margins’ character-led chapters throw a compelling cast into garbage-soaked situations, dragging big themes (grief, destiny) from the gutter and into the light.
This Brooklyn-based crew (some criminal, some innocent, all feel like family) feels so real you can practically smell the booze-breath in every bar-set paragraph, one character’s so violent you want to flinch from each page-turn, but they’re all so sympathetic you’ll want to buy the next round of drinks if only to help them numb their pain. Because, be warned, this is a dark book, full of melancholy, but also hope. The quiet moments have as much impact as the louder ones, making the experience akin to listening to a really good record.
So, yeah, worth your time and money - because, as City Of Margins' denizens will tell you, there are definitely worse ways to spend both.
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