The End

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.

Scibona loves language and recognizes the power of using the right word. He seems better educated than most American writers, with a strong vocabulary and rich ideas that urge him to build complex sentences.... To the reader's enrichment, The End is an outstanding work in all the right ways

Scibona is a gutsy, heart-and-soul writer, unafraid of emotion and ready to take risks

It may have taken a while for Scibona to get to this side of the Atlantic, but The End suggests this is the beginning of a fascinating career from an important new American voice

This is an extraordinary novel about the experience of immigration; unsentimental and beautifully written

Its moments of sharply realised emotional pull and gentle beauty reel you in

Its careful plotting and graceful language certainly show it to be a work of exquisite control

Crammed with clever, striking imagery and vivid passages of almost poetic dialogue... it's a work that exerts a hold over the reader, becoming incrasingly gripping as it progresses

Dealing with issues of identity and abandonment, and with an underlying sense of racial menace, this debut is difficult, dark and slyly humorous

By hijacking the realism of the immigrant novel with a metaphysics of his own, Scibona has created a daring, haunting addition to, and extension of, the genre

A masterful novel... Full of wisdom, consequence and grace, Salvatore Scibona's radiant debut brims with the promise of a remarkable literary career, of which The End is only the beginning

Engulfing. Entangled. Fate-laden. Flinty. Dry-eyed. Memento meets Augie March.  Didion meets Hitchcock. Serpentine. Alien. American. Ohioan. McCarthyite (Cormac). Bellowed (Saul)

Scibona excels at the creation of character

In his lyrical debut novel, The End, Salvatore Scibona brilliantly captures how this time warp lurks at the center of family life...In aiming to trace elements more than sentimental about relationships, though, Scibona has bravely reached beyond the familiar tricks of the realistic family novel. He has unleashed metaphors and ideas that have their own dark logic

Like no other contemporary writer, Salvatore Scibona is heir to Saul Bellow, Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf, and his masterful novel stands as proof of it - a concordance of the immigrant experience from the beautiful to the brutal and everything in between

There is an intensity of purpose to Salvatore Scibona's endeavour that is decidedly uncommon in a debut novel.... There is no doubt whatsoever of the beauty or brilliance of Scibona's writing

To write a stream-of consciousness story set over one day immediately invites comparisons with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. It is a mark of how good a writer Scibona is that he survives such comparisons

Scibona's formidable first novel is an evocative portrait of the American immigrant experience...What is most striking is how Scibona captures the sights, sounds and smells of immigrant life at a time when a generation of newcomers was merging into the mainstream.

This ravenous prose offers its share of challenges, but Scibona's portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force

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.

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. 
 
A National Book Award Finalist.

Salvatore Scibona

A magnificent counterpoint of four generations of fathers and sons... Like DeLillo in [Underworld], Scibona wreaks an epic from the lives of ordinary, supposedly negligible men. Scibona has built a masterpiece.

[Scibona is] a born novelist: He conveys a world in a detail. Scibona can take us into the broken heart of a child lost in a foreign airport, the shattering chaos of a night assault during the Vietnam War and the quiet intensity of a working-class New York neighborhood... Work like The Volunteer can never be one thing only, upbeat or down. It’s teeming, brilliantly.

Salvatore Scibona’s exhilarating new novel [is]… a searing record of war and the lies people live by… Despite all the destruction and despair, in this novel hope emerges as the wildest high.

What perfect pitch, what perfect rhythm. These are sentences that are in love with the world and that make us love the world, too.

Scibona is a remarkable writer and The Volunteer is a remarkable book... It is a war story unlike any other war story, a story of fathers and sons, of family (both biological and manufactured) and of generations of betrayal and abandonment... All of it — all of it — is just so ridiculously beautiful.

Salvatore Scibona is gravely, terminally, a born writer – a high artist and exquisite craftsman. Yes his sentences are perfect but not merely; a surplus of dark and tender wisdom, who knows its source, makes his language – and the world – glow with meaning.

The Volunteer is a wonder right from page one, lovely in its language and aching in its insights.

This magnificent and deeply moving novel by Salvatore Scibona, one of our most masterful writers, has at its heart the simple and compelling tale of a small boy abandoned in a foreign airport and a mysterious ‘volunteer’ who all his life, without knowing it, is trying to find him. In stunningly inventive prose, Scibona models the world through which these two beautifully drawn lost souls stumble—an infinitely-interconnected and repeating fractal of airplane routes and inscrutable tongues, of arbitrary hubs and meaningless destinations, of escapes and hideouts, of swarming megalopoli improbably wired to pitiful ghost towns such as only America can hide in its empty middle. All this under the crosshatched shadow of the military, for Scibona’s portrait of the way we live now is also, necessarily, a novel about war. The Volunteer is so brave, tough and admirable you are on his side before you recognize what you are looking at. He is the good soldier, the man who fights America’s wars.

Salvatore Scibona is a virtuoso and The Volunteer is a majestic, magnificent, frankly epic work of art. Characters with the most modest, vulnerable lives transform from 'nobodies' into full, precious human souls, steeped in pathos, tragedy, and a seemingly unstoppable heritage of particularly American violence. What tenderness and love they manage to wrest from their lives becomes nothing less than heroic and starkly, luminously beautiful.

Scibona’s lyrical yet muscular prose anchors this majestic work as he probes deep philosophical questions about family, identity, belonging, and sacrifice... Scibona’s greatest strength is his ability to inhabit each character with profound psychological depth to explore their guilt, doubt, and humanity. This novel rewards close reading and deserves wide readership.

Like the late Robert Stone, Scibona exhibits a command of language and demonstrates a knack for dramatizing the tidal pull of history on individual destiny. The novel accrues real power as its vividly imagined characters try to make sense of an often senseless world. This is a bold, rewarding novel.

The Volunteer possesses an intensity of purpose and takes in a broad sweep of time... Through Scibona’s masterful storytelling, modest, vulnerable characters—vividly imagined—are transformed into cherished and tragic souls able to seize benevolence and love as they try to make sense of an often senseless world. Scibona’s immersive, intense, and somber novel, its language eloquent and moving, deserves and requires a close reading... The Volunteer is a stirring examination into the meaning of family, identity, belonging, and sacrifice, and the effects of institutional power at its most horrifying.

Scibona delivers an enigmatic story that hinges on secrecy and uncertainty... As with his first novel, with which it has thematic similarities, Scibona's story takes in a broad sweep of time, looking into the future to foresee an end that may not be so terrible but that is just as certain... the narrative is marked by distinctive lyricism and striking images... original and memorable.

Scibona’s second novel sings with this type of mutable, potentially explosive detail, with events powered by tiny moments sprinkled across vast landscapes... It is not just the ebb and flow of family dynamics that make their mark on four generations in The Volunteer — both the weight of history and the influence of institutional power are also felt in the family’s losses.

[A] brilliant second novel… nothing is lost on Scibona, who builds his narrative masterfully over four hundred pages…[with] always-thrilling prose.

Ten years after his debut with The End, Scibona has produced another exceptional, challenging work… the prose is often stunning.

A muscular account of human frailty and a pitiless critique of western masculinity… The Volunteer drifts and broods… its cumulative power is like sustained rolling thunder.

A bravura piece of writing that reels you in before Scibona starts to make us sweat over his purpose… This is heart-rendering stuff, superbly done… Scibona lavishes attention on practically everyone his sprawling narrative reveals.

Scibona is an observant, lyrical writer, and the strength of his images and musicality of his sentences are almost enough to carry the novel on their own.

A searing yet poetic record of war and the lies people live by.

An odyssey of loss and salvation ranging across four generations of fathers and sons, in the finest tradition of American storytelling. 
 
The year is 1966 and a young man named Vollie Frade, almost on a whim, enlists in the United States Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. Breaking definitively from his rural Iowan parents, Vollie puts in motion a chain of events that sees him go to work for people with intentions he cannot yet grasp. From the Cambodian jungle, to a flophouse in Queens, to a commune in New Mexico, Vollie's path traces a secret history of life on the margins of America, culminating with an inevitable and terrible reckoning. 
 
Scibona’s story of a restless soldier pressed into service for a clandestine branch of the US government unfolds against the backdrop of the seismic shifts in global politics of the second half of the twentieth century. Epic in scope but intimate in feeling, this is a deeply immersive read from a rising star of American fiction.

Salvatore Scibona

Praise for The Volunteer

A magnificent counterpoint of four generations of fathers and sons... Like DeLillo in [Underworld], Scibona wreaks an epic from the lives of ordinary, supposedly negligible men. Scibona has built a ...

[Scibona is] a born novelist: He conveys a world in a detail. Scibona can take us into the broken heart of a child lost in a foreign airport, the shattering chaos of a night assault during the Vietnam War and ...

Salvatore Scibona’s exhilarating new novel [is]… a searing record of war and the lies people live by… Despite all the destruction and despair, in this novel hope emerges as the wildest high.

A magnificent counterpoint of four generations of fathers and sons... Like DeLillo in [Underworld], Scibona wreaks an epic from the lives of ordinary, supposedly negligible men. Scibona has built a ...

[Scibona is] a born novelist: He conveys a world in a detail. Scibona can take us into the broken heart of a child lost in a foreign airport, the shattering chaos of a night assault during the Vietnam War and ...

Salvatore Scibona’s exhilarating new novel [is]… a searing record of war and the lies people live by… Despite all the destruction and despair, in this novel hope emerges as the wildest high.

A magnificent counterpoint of four generations of fathers and sons... Like DeLillo in [Underworld], Scibona wreaks an epic from the lives of ordinary, supposedly negligible men. Scibona has built a ...

[Scibona is] a born novelist: He conveys a world in a detail. Scibona can take us into the broken heart of a child lost in a foreign airport, the shattering chaos of a night assault during the Vietnam War and ...

Salvatore Scibona’s exhilarating new novel [is]… a searing record of war and the lies people live by… Despite all the destruction and despair, in this novel hope emerges as the wildest high.

Books by Salvatore Scibona

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter