Gowanus: A Novel of Brooklyn Past and Further Past

by Robert E. Murphy

Lost Intrigues Found, Forgotten Sorrows Rediscovered One Neighborhood, two Brooklyns. A tenement-building is hollowed by fire and apparently harrowed by an old sadness. Robert E. Murphy has traveled back decades to find Evan Frist, a settler in a changing borough who becomes deeply curious about a devastating event that supposedly occurred several decades earlier on the street where he lives. Murphy follows Evan and his companions as they seek to find out what that event might have been, and he takes us back to the time of World War I, when gangsters stalked the New York waterfront and German and Irish partisans found common cause – roiling the simple, contented life of a good-natured Gowanus Canal barge-captain.

282 pages, Paperback

Published September 22, 2022

Reviews

[William Curatolo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since baseball plays a small part in this book, I will use a baseball cliché and say that Robert Murphy “hit the ball out of the park” with this book. This novel deals with the lives of dock workers and ship captains and their families in Brooklyn back in 1915, and mixes waterfront crime fiction with a background of real world historical characters. The relationship of German-Americans and Irish-Americans during World War I is explored. What jumped off the page for me is that Brooklyn itself is a vivid character in this book. Fascinating story. I enjoyed the book immensely.