Saint of the Narrows Street Audiobook

William Boyle is the master of Brooklyn-set crime fiction, and Saint of the Narrows Street is his magnum opus. For fans of The Sopranos, Jonathan Lethem, and Dennis Lehane.

A family stitched together by one violent, impulsive act. As the decades-long secret begins to unravel, one Italian American family will have to bear the consequences—and face each other—in this thrilling kitchen sink drama, a southern Brooklyn tragic opera of the highest caliber.

Gravesend, Brooklyn, New York, 1986. Risa Franzone lives in a ground-floor apartment on Saint of the Narrows Street with her bad-seed husband, Saverio, and their eight-month-old baby, Fabrizio. Risa is a loving mother, a faithful wife, a saintly neighbor—but lately, her husband’s slow dive into criminality and abuse has threatened her peace, raising concerns about her and her baby’s safety.

On the night her younger sister, Giulia, moves in with Risa to recover from a bad break-up, a fateful accident occurs: Risa, boiled over with anger and fear, strikes a drunk, erratic Sav with a cast-iron pan, killing him on the spot.

The sisters are left with a choice: to notify the authorities and make a case for self-defense or bury the man’s body and go on with their lives as best they can. In a moment of panic, in the late hours of the night, they call upon Sav’s childhood friend—the sweet, loyal Christopher “Chooch” Gardini—to help them, hoping they can trust him to carry a secret like this.

Over the vast, dramatic expanse of the next eighteen years, life goes on in the working-class Italian neighborhood of Gravesend as Risa, Giulia, and Chooch grapple with the choice they made that night—and each forge a different path when the cracks of a supposedly seamless cover-up begin to reveal themselves.

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“Boyle structures the sprawling tale like a Greek tragedy, mining potent themes of legacy and class with such force and empathy that readers may come to think of him as the Balzac of Brooklyn. It’s a stunning achievement.”

— Publishers Weekly (starred review)