Gangster

Informationen zum Autor Lorenzo Carcaterra is the author of the memoir A Safe Place, Apaches, and the New York Times bestseller Sleepers. He has written scripts for movies and television and is currently at work on his next novel. Klappentext Love. Violence. Destiny. These powerful themes ricochet through Lorenzo Carcaterra's new novel like bullets from a machine gun. In Gangster, he surpasses even his bestselling Sleepers to create a brutal and brilliant American saga of murder, forgiveness, and redemption. Born in the midst of tragedy and violence and raised in the shadow of a shocking secret, young Angelo Vestieri chooses to flee both his past and his father to seek a second family-the criminals who preside over early 20th century New York. In his bloody rise from soldier to mob boss, he encounters ever more barbaric betrayals-in friendship, in his brutal business, in love-yet simultaneously comes to understand the meaning of loyalty, the virtue of relationships, and gains a perspective on the lonely, if powerful, life he has chosen. As the years pass, as enemies are made and defeated, as wars are fought and won, the old don meets an abandoned boy who needs a parent as much as protection. By taking Gabe under his wing and teaching him everything he knows, Angelo Vestieri will learn, in the winter of his life, which is greater: his love for the boy he cherishes, or his need to be a gangster and to live by the savage rules he helped create. A sweeping panoramic with riveting characters, a unique understanding of the underworld philosophy, and a relentless pace, Gangster travels through the time of godfathers and goodfellas to our own world of suburban Sopranos. But this is more than just an authentic chronicle of crime. Setting a new standard for this acclaimed author, Gangster is a compassionate portrait of one man's fight against his fate-and an unforgettable epic of a family, a city, a century.Summer, 1906 He hated dredging up memories. They did not stir in him a taste for nostalgia or loves lost. He saw in them only one purpose—to harden the shell he had chiseled with care, the one that hid all that could be deemed vulnerable and kept entombed the signs of humanity. When he talked to me about his early years, it was with the voice of a stranger, as if what had been had touched the life of another, one a safe distance removed from the fray. In the telling, his eyes never strayed beyond my face and his voice retained its deep pitch, no matter the emotional import of what was recalled. I was ten when I first heard the story of his ocean crossing, and as I sat in the hospital room listening to Mary’s account of the tale, the early moments of the dying man’s life came exploding back, as real, as hard and as fresh as a wave. His ship was three days out of Naples when the storm hit. Four levels below the deck, walled-in against an overworked engine, six hundred men, women and children were crammed into a space designed for two hundred. The stench of waste mingled with that of burning oil and spouting steam. The cargo hold, normally a dry haven for luggage and sealed goods, was now little more than a moaning assembly of humanity. Families sat in small circles, huddled under tattered coverlets of soiled sheets and clothes. Infants wailed against the pangs of hunger and the nibbling of rats. The elderly chewed tobacco leaves instead of food, black spittle coarsing down their chins. Women, young and old, sang Neapolitan ballads to lift deadened spirits and prayed daily to a stern God for a quick end to a dark journey. They boarded the ship under a blanket of darkness, paying twenty-five thousand lira—nearly five hundred dollars— per head to a local broker, Giorgio Salvecci, an overweight landlord who kept a tan overcoat draped over his shoul- ders regardless of season. Salvecci shipped skins—Italian immigrants—across the Atlantic Ocean and int...

Product details

• Authors: Lorenzo Carcaterra
• Publisher: Fawcett Book Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.07.2002
• EAN: 9780345425294
• ISBN: 978-0-345-42529-4
• No. of pages: 416
• Dimensions: 106 mm x 175 mm x 26 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Suspense > Crime fiction, thrillers, espionage