Paradise Salvage

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What to expect

Paradise Salvage is both a taut thriller and a lyrical coming-of-age story following twelve-year-old Nunzio Paradiso’s last summer of innocence.

For Nunzio, each new wreck towed into Paradise Salvage is a desultory gift from Fortune, a random opportunity for discovery. But on a hot summer day in 1979, in the trunk of an abandoned Pontiac Bonneville, he uncovers a secret that will change his life. Then, in the blink of an eye, all evidence is lost to the crusher, and only his older brother Danny Boy believes Nunzio’s story.

Enlisting the help of a cousin, an ex-cop with a dark history of his own, they embark on a bizarre and dangerous journey that proves to be as much one of personal discovery as an unraveling of the mystery behind the corpse at Paradise Salvage.

Critics Review

“John Fusco has given us a book with a large and loving heart. Paradise Salvage is a work of triumph.”

Lorenzo Carcaterra, New York Times bestselling author

“Proves
home is where the heart is…Corruption may drive Fusco’s plot, but quirky
characters definitely hold the steering wheel.”

Boston Herald

“Fusco’s fiction debut has many simpatico characters [and] some charming scenes.”

Kirkus Reviews

“If you’re
hoping for a leisurely, sentimental study of time and place, Fusco delivers.”

Rocky Mountain News

“[An] ambitious
coming-of-age pseudothriller debut.”

Publishers Weekly

“Hilarious
and touching. With a screenwriter’s flair for the sensuous, the book is an
explosion of visual and tactile and olfactory impressions. We are catapulted
into Little Italy.”

Stowe Reporter (Vermont)

“The story,
set in a working-class Connecticut town in 1979, brims with suspense,
adventure, and Italian-American culture as Nuncio and his older brother must
face incredulous adults, corrupt officials, violence, death, and Italian
superstitions.”

AudioFile

“Fusco does so many things so well in this novel.”

Alfred Rosa, professor of English at the University of Vermont

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