The Inland Sea

"The Inland Sea is a poignant novel told in a series of twelve intricately connected stories depicting twenty-five years in the life of Vincent Torno and the extremes of family and landscape that shape and haunt him.". "Vincent Torno is the youngest child in an Italian-American family living in California's San Joaquin Valley. With a World War II veteran-businessman father whose conception of a logical ordered world is both oppressive and reassuring, and a mother whose never-discussed mental illness and recurrent breakdowns crash through the family like waves, Vincent is a boy whose desire for understanding is particularly acute. But as he moves out into the world - to the Midwest, Seattle, Manhattan - he finds it hardly more comprehensible than his own family. And that which seemed most stable - the landscape of his once agricultural hometown - is transformed with disorienting rapidity." "The Inland Sea chronicles Vincent Torno's twisting journey to a time when he finally comes to grips with the hard, hazardous, and always unsettling work of love and forgiveness."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.