To Each His Own, by Leonardo Sciascia

Last week I was in LA and I paid a visit to Skylight Books, a shop I last visited more than 5 years ago and remembered liking. Skylight has an impressive selection of fiction in translation, including a little shelf of new releases in translation, something I haven't seen elsewhere. They had 3 books by Leonardo Sciascia on the fiction shelves in handsome little NYRB editions -- I'm such a sucker for the NYRB classics, though I feel like they have often disappointed me. I'm also a sucker for books set in Sicily, so these Sciascia volumes were basically a perfect little trap for me. I hadn't heard of Sciascia and I bought To Each His Own partly so I wouldn't forget his name (I almost bought two of his books!). It's a slim mystery that I finished in just a few hours, and yet it packs in digressions on literature, indictments of fascism and the Catholic church, a little bit of heartbreak, and a bigger sense of unease into that small space.