Before All the World

A mesmerizing, inventive story of three souls in 1930s Philadelphia seizing new life while haunted by the old, from the award-winning author of Sadness Is a White Bird. I do not believe that all the world is darkness. In the swirl of Philadelphia at the end of Prohibition, Leyb meets Charles. They are at a former speakeasy called Cricket's, a bar that welcomes, as Charles says in his secondhand Yiddish, feygeles. Leyb is startled; fourteen years in amerike has taught him that his native tongue i