Here at last is a captivating novel set in the formative days of the Mafia, in nineteenth-century Sicily. Crozier Green zooms in on this volatile period of the historically embattled island: at the dawn of a unified Italy that was anything but. Green’s Sicily is a brutal landscape inhabited by characters of outsized passions, despite the double-bind of poverty and exploitation, in the manner of Émile Zola. It’s an alluring backdrop for the story’s love triangle, one rife with betrayals and complicated by the strictures of “brotherhood.” The Little Wagons plays with the old legends of Mediterranean Secret Societies: exotic tales shrouded in decorum and notions of honour that mask the eternal struggle for power. Yet its rich narrative details—from the hell of working the sulphur mines to the trauma of surviving Palermo’s prison fortress—can only come from an author’s deep research. The reader is richer for Green’s nimble fusion of fact and fiction.
Carl Russo, author, The Sicilian Mafia: A True Crime Travel Guide