Sketches Of The Common Saints

Sketches Of The Common Saints is an audacious, funny, and wistful portrayal of a Southern Italian family and the genuine world they inhabit.  From the ominous beauty of Reggio Calabria, through the baroque cityscapes of Torino, to the promise and sometimes harsh reality of Toronto's working-class streets, these nine interrelated sketches are reflections of common folk and their journey towards a kind of sainthood in the culmination of a dream. 

Told from various perspectives, in clear and fast-paced prose that often dances with the poetic, each story is conveyed through an unfiltered lens of blunt realism imbued with imagery that evokes the common beauty of a working-class culture navigating the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a willing and necessary diaspora. Steeped in a traditional world where the sanctity of the family and the suffocating beauty of the Catholic Church often intermingle with the dark doorways of iniquity and the unforgiving weight of burden; these people face the emptiness and the absurdity and the bounty of life, with a jaundiced eye and an unbridled passion, offering no apologies and putting on no airs. Taken on their own, or as a part of the larger narrative, the stories befit a boisterous Sunday table replete with heaping plates of pasta, carafes of homemade wine, and the fullness of life unfolding.