The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke [Hardcover]

This well-constructed, lively first novel is a spirited triple play about love, friendship, and baseball. Set in Toronto in 1933, the story is told using an imaginative mix of fact and fiction to relate a humorous, magical story of Italian and Jewish immigrants trying to make their way in their new city. Lucio, age 17, falls in love with a gorgeous Jewish radical, Ruthie the red-headed Red, several years his senior. Also included in a huge cast of characters are Dubie, Lucio's best friend, who is also in love with Ruthie and who accidentally cuts off his finger at the moment he realizes it; a veranda-full of their fast-talking immigrant parents; five unmarried Italian brothers; swastika-waving anti-Semites; an entire baseball team; an Irish priest; and a plaster saint, as well as the second-best ballplayer Toronto would ever see.

Hayward has captured the immigrant lingo with uncanny accuracy and employs a great deal of dialogue, making this a highly readable book. He is particularly skilled at depicting the great crowd scenes of immigrant life (and the frustrations they cause young lovers looking for solitude). Ruthie, who is organizing a citywide sweatshop walkout, is a marvelous, fully fleshed character and an unexpected heroine. "Soon," she says to Lucio in reference to their unconsummated love relationship, and it seems to him "as if she is talking about the Revolution itself." The conclusion, set during the real Christie Pits riot and a baseball game preceding it, is a tour de force. While the reader does not have to be a baseball fan to enjoy this book, it certainly adds to the pleasure. An excellent, entertaining read. --Mark Frutkin

“An absolute pleasure. . . . Hayward’s Ward has all the charm and colour of Richler’s St. Urbain Street. . . . [The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke] is as powerful a rendering of the early 20th century immigrant experience in Toronto as is Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.”
—Toronto Star

“Powerful….Hayward often achieves the insight and wit of Ring Lardner’s baseball stories, as well as the whimsical magic of W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe. . . . The charm of this novel is in its easy-going humour and well-crafted sentences. . . . Hayward’s characters are always engaging, and he does a splendid job of revealing their quirks and amusing contradictions. . . . A novel with note-perfect dialogue, evocative descriptions and laugh-out-loud funny bits.”
—The Globe and Mail

“A comic, picaresque tale filled with colourful adventures. . . . The ease with which Hayward combines baseball, social history, comedy, family sagas and a love story suggests that he may crack CanLit’s starting lineup in the years ahead.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

"The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke is a wonderful novel, funny and touching, and full of more sheer invention than most novelists stretch over a career. It is a great achievement."
—Paul Quarrington, author of Galveston

"The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke is full of colorful, larger-than-life characters and richly rendered action. Steven Hayward has created a mythic Toronto that will live vividly in the reader’s imagination."
—Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me

“In a debut novel, Depression-era Toronto comes alive as a magical and slightly unreal landscape. . . . More light than stark. . . . [The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke] is lively and fun.”
—TIME

“A great story, filled with ample humour and affecting tragedy. . . . Hayward captures the prewar era and the angst of passing into adulthood with great assurance in this gem of a novel.”
—Edmonton Journal

“If Hayward is a new face his soul feels old. . . . {He is] an engaging writer, with an offbeat sense of humour and a knack for making us care about his seriously flawed but mainly big-hearted characters. There are traces of Bernard Malamud’s baseball fable, The Natural in The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke, and some John Irving, too. . . . In the world according to Hayward, you expect the unexpected.”
—Joel Yanofsky, National Post

Praise for Steven Hayward:
"The genius of Toronto writer Steven Hayward. . .is to take the daily slipshod passage of trivial- to- traumatic events, present it as pure storytelling and distil from it the essence of what it means to live, through times both terrible and transcendent. . . . Hayward takes things we hope aren’t possible, things we hope won’t happen, and shows that their happening is precisely what it’s all about — and we’re as blessed as we are cursed by it. . . . It’s been years since I’ve seen this much fresh talent and wisdom."
—The Globe and Mail

"Hayward sneaks in the back door, pulls out your heart and hands it back on a plate for examination."
—Canadian Literary Review

"Hayward is already an accomplished storyteller, whose work is filled with enough bright bits of truth and compassionate humour to make whatever he tries his hand at next well worth looking out for."
—Toronto Star

“Blending history with fiction is something Steven Hayward does exceptionally well. . . . [Hayward] creates an unforgettable tale made all the starker through its historical context. You'll laugh and shudder, smile and shiver. Despair and hope, denial and accountability, friendship and heartbreak, it’s all the stuff of the human drama.”
—January Magazine