| Summary: | Within the walls of<br> <br> Echo Terrace, the world ...</p> <p>A beautifully resonant novel with a dazzling array of characters whose life stories are woven together into a breathtaking braid of love and memory.</p> <p>Farro Fescu is the proud and observant concierge of Echo Terrace, a condominium in New York City. Passing through his lobby at all hours of the night and day is an exotic cross-section of the world's population: an Egyptian-born plastic surgeon who lives on the fifth floor and specializes in gender reassignment; a fighter pilot, on the eighth floor, who flew for Nazi Germany during World War II; an Iraqi spice merchant and the world-famous crazy-patch quilter with whom he's having an affair; the adulterer's son, dreaming of becoming an undertaker; and the widow whose apartment is a jungle Eden filled with a menagerie of specimens -- finches, canaries, a defanged cobra, a monkey named Joe -- that had been the subject of her dead husband's research.</p> <p>Farro Fescu knows them all, knows all their secrets. He knows what happened to Yesenia Rivera, the nineteen-year-old staff housekeeper from Queens, when she took a fateful ride one evening on the Staten Island Ferry. He alone knows the truth behind the mysterious mishap that befell the fashion designer Ira Klempp, a resident of the twelfth floor. And he knows -- and would like to know much more -- about the alluring María Gracia Moño, sometime lover of Harry Falcon, the brilliant captain of industry who lives in the penthouse and is dying of cancer.</p> <p>He is keenly attuned to the building and the people in it, yet he does not know what is in his own heart -- why, after a long, hard life, he is still alive, and still alone. Nor does he know what he will be capable of in the face of sudden, overwhelming tragedy.</p> <p>As the narrative eye of Between Two Rivers floats from one apartment to another, revealing the characters' private histories and tracing the dramatic intersections of their daily lives, a lush tapestry of experience emerges. The story, in beautifully textured prose, is laced with wit and humor, subtle ironies and haunting echoes, and everywhere a profound sense of the resilience of the human spirit.</p>
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