NYRB Classics: To Each His Own

Edwin Frank continues to cull some of his favorites from the NYRB Classics line...

"NYRB has published several novels and a volume of short stories by the Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia, along with his report on the murder of the Italian politician Aldo Moro. Of all these books, I think my favorite is the novel To Each His Own, a story of Sicily, silence, and suspicion in which even the most every day and innocent transactions between people are fraught with unforeseen danger. The ending of the book is all the more devastating for the fact that--at least after it is over--you feel like you knew it was coming all along.

"Also brilliant is Sciascia's The Day of the Owl, a story of the Mafia in which, by a perfectly perverse irony, the crime is 'solved' when the police succeed it in covering it up: the truth, as it were, is buried for good."