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Shop nowParadise Salvage
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Learn moreParadise 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.
John Fusco left high school to work variously as a factory machinist, sawmill hand, motorcycle seat upholsterer, and traveling blues musician. A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, he has written and produced eight major motion pictures, including Thunderheart and Young Guns. He lives with his wife and son on their stud farm in Vermont.
Brian Emerson is an actor and technical director with a long career in the Washington, DC, and Baltimore areas.
Reviews
“John Fusco has given us a book with a large and loving heart. Paradise Salvage is a work of triumph.”
“Proves home is where the heart is...Corruption may drive Fusco’s plot, but quirky characters definitely hold the steering wheel.”
“Fusco’s fiction debut has many simpatico characters [and] some charming scenes.”
“If you’re hoping for a leisurely, sentimental study of time and place, Fusco delivers.”
“[An] ambitious coming-of-age pseudothriller debut.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Fusco does so many things so well in this novel.”
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