North End Boy

Book excerpt: North End Boy is a fast-paced memoir about seven young friends coming of age in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The action takes place over two days in the summer of 1978 - a time before computers, before globalization, before the end of the Cold War - when most people still worked with their hands.At the beginning of the story, the friends are enjoying the late stages of an advanced adolescence with few ambitions and fewer responsibilities. Twenty-four hours later, they endure the loss of one of their own, a loss that forces adulthood upon them. Decisions have to be made - about families and careers, ultimately about their destiny. One embraces the family business. One moves out to California. One finds redemption in the Catholic Church. Another one doesn't. The author, Kevin Brady, was born and raised in the North End of Elizabeth, where his Irish immigrant parents settled after the war. An intensely local book, North End Boy is also a larger meditation on post-war America, as seen through the eyes of a young man with immigrant sensibilities and working-class roots.