Hardcover: 448 pages Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; 1 edition (May 8, 2012) English ISBN-10: 0446574627 ISBN-13: 978-0446574624	Order book here:
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Characters:

Luca Brasi – Gangster
Vito Corleone – Business Man with questionable ties.
Sonny Corleone – A seventeen year old trying to make his own mark.

Synopsis:

Just when you thought you were out, they pull you back in. This time back to the beginning years of the 1930s. A time of bootleg alcohol, gangsters, and great Italian cuisine.

Review

It’s hard when a writer takes over the property of another writer. It nearly borders on blasphemy when it’s the property of Mario Puzo and his characters from The Godfather. I went into this with nervous apprehension. I was worried that he might not be able to capture the feel of the characters. I was completely wrong.

Mr. Falco managed to capture the feel and aura of these characters tremendously. In fact, he not only captured it, but he enhanced what readers already knew about the characters and made them even deeeper and more real. However, he wasn’t alone in that endevor. He was assisted by Mr. Puzo himself. Prior to his death, Mr. Puzo had worked on a screenplay that remained unfinished. Using pages from that unfinished screenplay, Mr. Falco managed to turn Mr. Puzo’s thoughts into this story. The reader learns more about the primary characters such as Sonny and Vito, but also get to know characters such as Luca Brasi better than ever before.

If you loved the Godfather movies, but have never read Mr. Puzo’s original, I’d suggest you start here. I found myself often flipping back and forth between the two novels, and even minor characters make an appearance making the two books seem almost seamless.

If your a fan of Mob Fiction, a fan of Mario Puzo’s or a Godfather Fan, pick this book up. I think there’s a good chance you’ll love it as much as I did. Now I have the urge to go back and re-read The Godfather after 20 some years.

About the Author

Ed Falco’s most recent books include the story collections, Burning Man (SMU, 2011), and the novel Saint John of the Five Boroughs (Unbridled, 2009). Other books include Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories (Unbridled, 2006), Wolf Point, a novel,(Unbridled, 2006) and In the Park of Culture, a collection of short fictions from The University of Notre Dame Press. His earlier works include the novel Winter in Florida, the hypertext novel, A Dream with Demons, the hypertext poetry collection, Sea Island, and a chapbook of prose poem, Concert in the Park of Culture, as well as two collections of short stories: Acid and Plato at Scratch Daniel’s & Other Stories. Acid won the Richard Sullivan Prize from the University of Notre Dame, and was a finalist for The Patterson Prize. He has won a number of other prizes and awards for his writing, including an NEA Fellowship in fiction, a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship in playwriting, the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Short Fiction from The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Robert Penn Warren Prize in Poetry from The Southern Review, The Mishima Prize for Innovative Fiction from The Saint Andrews Review, a Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, two Individual Artist’s Fellowships from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and The Governor’s Award for the Screenplay from The Virginia Festival of American Film. His stories have been published widely in journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, and TriQuarterly, and collected in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and several anthologies, including, Blue Cathedral: Short Fiction for the New Millennium. An early innovator in the field of digital writing, Falco’s online work includes Self-Portrait as Child w/Father (Iowa Review Web), Circa 1967-1968 (Eastgate Reading Room), “Charmin’ Cleary” (Eastgate Reading Room), and “Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales (with photographer Mary Pinto, in Volume I of The Electronic Literature Collection).

Falco lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he is the director of Virginia Tech’s MFA program, and he edits The New River, an online journal of digital writing.

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