THE HEART OF THE CENTURY

War and peace, love and death, romance and betrayal, these are the crucial questions confronted by the men and women of the Greatest Generation in this novel of four people and their interweaving stories, connected by the forces that enrapture us all during the hardscrabble days of the Great Depression and the vital battles of World War II, from the Appalachian countryside where Coal is King to the nightclubs, racetracks, and cabin cruisers of the high life. Young Andy Petrovich dreams of escaping the struggles of the company patch only to be sent sailing to Russia on board the USS Ruby. Peggy LaStoria finds the fire to her vibrant, vivacious womanhood in the arms of Rings Romano. Gerry LaStoria crosses the country in the Superchief to a wartime honeymoon in Balboa Park with the only man who's ever kissed her. And their brother, Augie LaStoria, tested by the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach, survives the crucible of hand-to-hand combat only to confront the existential landscape of postwar America, never knowing his final destination will be a city on a hill.

The Heart of the Century is Volume 3 of Eugene Christy's monumental saga of three generations of an American immigrant family. Watch for the final two volumes of The Twentieth Century Quintet coming soon from Adelaide Books in 2021.

 

Paperback: 396 pages

ISBN-10: 1954351097

ISBN-13: 978-1954351097

Dimensions: 6 x 0.88 x 9 inches

Publishing date: November 16, 2020

 

Eugene Christy is a novelist, poet and musician currently enjoying retirement in his home in the Berkshires. His maternal grandparents Antonio Scioscia and Giuseppina Fabrizio came from Alta Villa Irpina, near Avellino, in the South of Italy. He is a graduate of both Boston College and the University of Rhode Island, where he did his master’s degree in 1970, focusing on the authors of the Irish Literary Revival. At Boston College, he studied under Seán Ó Faoláin, and as a post-graduate under James Dickey and Larry McMurtry.

Appearing as Gene Christy, he was previously known around the Berkshires as the singer-songwriter and accordian-player who led The Dossers, the Irish-themed pub-band trio also featuring Bill Morrison and Rick Marquis.

His current project, seven years in the making, is called THE TWENTIETH CENTURY QUINTET, five novels telling the saga of Antonio LaStoria and his descendants through three generations in America from 1899 to 1972, now being published by Adelaide Books, New York and Lisbon, in 2020 and 2021. Volume 1 in this series of novels, ARRIVEDERCI NEW YORK, came out on Feb. 16th, 2020, and its sequel, MY SON THE AMERICAN, is due for release in August of 2020. Volumes 3, 4 and 5 will follow at Christmastime of 2020 and early in 2021.

After Volume 1, each novel in THE TWENTIETH CENTURY QUINTET is a sequel of the one before, forming a continuous narration of three generations of an archetypal American immigrant family from 1899 to 1972, and from Italy to America to Ireland, from the battlefields of World War II to the streets of Belfast and Derry during The Troubles.