A "vigorous, tough" novel that "dramatizes so well the awful power of family," by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Whites and Clockers (The Atlantic Monthly).
Eighteen-year-old Stony De Coco has to make a choice: either join his father in the tightly knit world of New York's construction unions or take off and find his own path. But Stony's family is not about to make that choice easy. As he struggles to protect his little brother, Albert, from their dangerously unbalanced mother, and to postpone the difficult adult responsibilities that await him, he finds hope in a job working with children at a hospital—a job that promises not to make anyone happy but Stony.
"For all of its surface violence, blunt language and brute realism," this story of working-class life in the Bronx "is a most subtle book. A sharp portrait of coming-of-age, in sorrow and in strength" (The Washington Post Book World).
"Richard Price is the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced." —Dennis Lehane
