“THIS IS A TERRIFIC NOVEL! It puts you inside living breathing characters you care about, who do things you wish they wouldn't, and whom you follow with bated breath to see how they'll get out of this." Tamim Ansary, author of “West of Kabul, East of New York,” and “The Invention of Yesterday. ”Through A Broken Window” is the coming of age saga of 12-year-old Jerry Epstein, set on the sandlot baseball fields and in the delis and diners of small town, 1964 New Jersey. Much of it takes place in Jerry’s dad’s luncheonette, in the mob-infested hamlet of East Orange. This is the era before McDonald’s and other franchises sprouted like weeds, wiping out many of the mom and pop greasy spoons that immigrant families relied on for their livelihoods. That’s how the Epstein clan found themselves in the middle of a hamburger turf war with Nicoletti, a wannabe mobster, whose “Made” daddy bought him his own hamburger franchise, to keep him out of trouble and out of a life of organized crime. But Nicoletti only knows trouble. And soon finds it by opening his Hamburger Heaven joint across the street from the Epstein’s little All Right Coffee Shop, threatening their livelihood. Our ambitious young Jerry has big plans for his life and doesn’t appreciate that it can all be taken away from him and his family by this scary man, just like that. One afternoon, while working at the store, Jerry’s dad sends him to the market to buy some lemons. On the walk there, Jerry passes Nicoletti’s Hamburger Heaven place, still under construction, and is taunted and teased by a brutish Nicoletti. Jerry’s response was to hurl a piece of brick at Nicoletti, who was standing behind a large plate glass window. As the window shattered, so did the safety and security of Jerry and his entire clan. Their lives were now in the cross-hairs of a dark, dangerous and unpredictable man. Meanwhile, always brewing at the heart of the story is a fast pitch softball tournament between long-rivaled schools in Linden, NJ (another mob-infested little town). Old rivalries are stoked, and new ones are made in almost every tension-filled inning. Poor Jerry, one day he’s the strong-armed starting shortstop, the next, to no fault of his own, he’s left out of the lineup in the biggest, most important game of his young life. How does Jerry handle his disappointment? And how does his team handle it when, though it's billed a softball tournament, one rival team insists on playing hardball.