"Fante's maturest, indeed, wisest work."Steve Cooper, from Full of Life, A Biography of John FanteHenry Molise, a 50-year-old successful writer, returns to the family home to help with the latest drama; his elderly parents want to divorce. Henry's tyrannical, bricklaying father, Nick, despite being weakened by age and alcoholism, can still strike fear into the hearts of his sons. His mother, ill and devoutly Catholic, still has the power both to comfort and confuse her children.Nick has been offered a some well-paid work to build a somkehouse in the hills, and Henry, realising this is the last chance for father and son to understand each other, turns his back on his publisher's demands and on the last 30 years of estrangement from his childhood to help the old man.The Brotherhood of the Grape is typical of Fante's novels, it's autobiographical, and brimming with love, death, violence and religion. Writing with great passion Fante powerfully hits home the damage family can wreak upon us all."Fante was capable of expressing thought and experience with an honesty that was as intimate as it was evocative, and as magical as it was true." Time Out (on Ask the Dust)"The late John Fante is oneof the great unheralded voices in American fiction." The FaceCover design by James Hutcheson

Fante's searing, effortless style eschewed the refinement of Fitzgerald, the hubris of Hemingway and the panoramic vistas of Dos Passos. Instead he marshalled the raw materials of his own life - poverty, sex, paternal hatred, Catholic guilt, misplaced pride, hard drinking, labour, fighting, overarching literary ambition and the internecine hatred within immigrant communities in pre-war America - rendering the pain and comedy with such heartbreaking simplicity as to brook no hint of the literary zeitgeist.