Comic and sad, poignant and absurd, disturbing and tragic, Merigan is the unsentimental but compassionate tale of a people and a world in spiritual disarray and moral collapse. Set in an Ohio steel mill town between 1960 and 1976, Merigan tells the story of Italian immigrants lured to America by the oldest of temptations and rarest of opportunities: the chance to escape the past and themselves and to begin life anew. Young Anthony Malfiore must navigate between the conviction of his grandfather and his father that America is the land of opportunity, promise, and freedom, and the suspicion of his grandmother that America is a land cursed beyond redemption. In the end, Anthony alone faces the shattering emotional consequences of this antagonism, while he struggles to find meaning and purpose amid the wreckage of lives mangled and cancerous. As the bard and historian of his people, Anthony emerges from his ordeal with a contrite and mournful hope in the possibility of love and rebirth.