cover image The Prince

The Prince

Vito Bruschini, trans. from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel. Atria, $26 (448p) ISBN 978-1-4516-8719-4

Bruschini makes his U.S. debut with a brutal Mafia epic that spans the years from 1921 to 1943 and details the rise of fascism under Mussolini. When Prince Ferdinando Licata, a prominent landowner in the Sicilian town of Salemi, is implicated in a murder in 1939, he’s forced to leave Italy for America. He establishes himself in New York City, where he gets caught up in a battle between rival Irish and Italian gangs in the Bronx. At the height of WWII, he returns to Sicily, where he gets into worse trouble. Scenes of shocking violence serve only to highlight the otherwise dry narrative and its shallow, frequently clichéd characterizations. The author spends so much time on the minutiae of peripheral characters, as well as some awkward and extraneous sex scenes, that the reader never truly gets to know Licata. By the end, too many plot points are left unexplained. [em]Agent: Tom Colchie, Colchie Literary Agency. (Mar.) [/em]