In stories brimming with life, Anthony De Sa captures the innocent dreams and bitter disappointments of the immigrant experience.

At the heart of this collection of intimately linked stories is the relationship between a father and his son. A young fisherman washes up nearly dead on the shores of Newfoundland. It is Manuel Rebelo, who has tried to escape the suffocating smallness of his Portuguese village and the crushing weight of his mother’s expectations to build a future for himself in a terra nova. Manuel struggles hard to shed the traditions of a village frozen in time and to silence his mother’s brutal voice, but the promise of his adopted land is not as simple as he’d hoped.

Manuel’s son, Antonio, is born into Toronto’s Little Portugal, a world of colourful houses and labyrinthine back alleys. In the Rebelo home the Church looms large, men and women inhabit sharply divided space, pigs are slaughtered in the garage, and the family lives in the shadow cast by Manuel’s failures. Most days Antonio and his friends take to their bikes, pushing the boundaries of their neighbourhood street by street. When they finally break through to the city beyond they confront dangers of a new sort.

With fantastic detail, larger-than-life characters and passionate empathy, Anthony De Sa invites readers into the lives of the Rebelo’s and finds there both the promise and the disappointment inherent in the choices made by the father and the expectations placed on the son.