First published in 1986. Named one of the Best Books of that year by the American Library Association.
After his mother's death, a shy 10-year-old boy from the suburbs must find a place for himself with his grandmother's boisterous Italian-American family in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood in the summer of 1961.
"Shepherd Avenue...has terrific force" - The New York Times
"Shepherd Avenue is a remarkably rich first novel, filled with marvelous and memorable scenes - Joey's first stickball game, his first hilarious and poignant brush with sex, his first fight, his first infatuations...What makes these scenes so marvelous is that they are informed always with a sure and true sense of exactly what it is like to be a 10-year-old boy who is trying to make sense of a world that often makes no sense."
- The Philadelphia Inquirer
"This first novel is most effective in capturing the idiosyncrasies of Italian-Americans..."
-Library Journal
advertisement