"City of Margins"

William Boyle is from Brooklyn, New York. His books include: Gravesend, which was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France and shortlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger in the UK; The Lonely Witness, which was nominated for the Hammett Prize and is nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière; and A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Boyle applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, City of Margins, and reported the following:

On page 69 of City of Margins, college dropout Mikey Baldini—aimless, drunk, about to turn twenty-one—stumbles to the library in his South Brooklyn neighborhood after fighting with his mother. Mikey is a cross between John Fante’s Arturo Bandini and the Mikey that Peter Falk plays in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky; he’s raw-nerved, lost in the world, searching for some kind of connection. What he finds at the library is a box of donated books. He takes the box and—while flipping through the battered paperbacks—discovers what looks like a suicide note. Stuffed somewhere else in the box is a piece of paper with a phone number written on it. He calls the number and is led down a path he couldn’t possibly have anticipated. This page is pretty representative of the rest of the book in terms of exploring chance and coincidence, in setting up the mystery of how lives in the neighborhood are tangled together.

Visit William Boyle's website.

My Book, The Movie: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness.

The Page 69 Test: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness.

Writers Read: William Boyle.

--Marshal Zeringue