Reviews of The End

A Poets & Writers "Summer Debut Star"

“Engulfing. Entangled. Fate-laden. Flinty. Dry-eyed. Memento meets Augie March. Didion meets Hitchcock. Serpentine. Alien. American. Ohioan. McCarthyite (Cormac). Bellowed (Saul).”—Esquire

“[Scibona] brilliantly shows how even immigration cannot sever the looping ties of blood…bold, beautiful.—Boston Globe

"Scibona has crafted a masterful novel of serious consequence, a novel unafraid to split into the breastplate of humankind and aim a floodlight at the demons dancing there." —Southern Review

“Scibona’s subject is the meaning of place, time, consciousness, memory and, above all, language. Think not only Faulkner, but also T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Ravenous prose…a literary tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Brooding, intermittently gorgeous, bittersweet, and devastating…this is one loaded novel about twentieth-century-America’s growing pains.”—Booklist

“As Scibona moves back-and-forth in time, and shifts perspective from one carefully drawn character to another, he slowly puts together a portrait of a community in transition. A demanding but rewarding novel.”—Kirkus

“Salvatore Scibona has written a debut novel of impressive proportions.—Deseret News (Salt Lake City, UT)

“Salvatore Scibona has written a ravishing book: radiant, wise, and wonderfully idiosyncratic. It is thrilling to see the immigrant novel reinvented with such originality and deep feeling, where the language catches fire on every page. As much a metaphysical novel as a historical one, The End not only follows its searching characters as they travel across countries, states, and city blocks, but also charts hauntingly the journeys of their souls. Their arrival, in the form of this astonishing book, is cause for celebration.” —Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

“The End is an ambitious book in both scope and structure. Scibona does a remarkable job of summoning a time and place not only through the exactitude of his descriptions but by so convincingly inhabiting the interior worlds of his many characters, whose pathos he manages to get right down into the grammar of the sentences that compose them. Add to this the overall verve and playfulness of the language here and it reminds one of the “Wandering Rocks” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses: one city’s compendium of souls offered up to the reader for companionship by the force of a writer’s imagination.”—Adam Haslett

“Like no other contemporary writer, Salvatore Scibona is heir to Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, and Virginia Woolf, and his masterful novel stands as proof of it—a concordance of the immigrant experience from the beautiful to the brutal and everything in between. Each character stands both illuminated like a saint and obscured in shadows of past lives, debts and secrets. In The End, all the “beautiful caves” of the characters’ pasts connect, and “each comes to daylight at the present moment” in ways that leave one touched, surprised, and amazed.”—ZZ Packer

“This is a novel to reread, to return to many times over. Be prepared to be stunned.” —Provincetown Arts

“[The End’s] careful plotting and graceful language certainly show it to be a work of exquisite control. —Los Angeles Times

“[Scibona’s] use of language is subtle, seductive, and sometimes deserves rereading a passage out loud.”—Sacramento Book Review

“The End takes one more nod from its modernist predecessors in its perfectly formed architecture, which is on display as much as any plot point. It takes those quietly powerful moments and assembles them into something truly monumental.—Straight.com (Vancouver, BC)

Watch Galley Cat's interview with Salvatore Scibona after the Young Lion's Fiction Award here