Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History

Now a PBS documentary, this astonishing memoir of growing up in rough-and-tumble Jersey City will steal your heart (People)

With deadpan humor and obvious affection, Five-Finger Discount recounts the story of an unforgettable New Jersey family of swindlers, bookies, embezzlers, and mobster-wannabes. In the memoir Mary Karr calls a page-turner, Helene Stapinski ingeniously weaves the checkered history of her hometown of Jersey City-a place known for its political corruption and industrial blight-with the tales that have swirled around her relatives for decades. Navigating a childhood of toxic waste and tough love, Stapinski tells an extraordinary tale at once heartbreaking and hysterically funny.

Praise for Five-Finger Discount

By turns hilarious and alarming, [Helene Stapinski’s] book reads on the surface like something by Damon Runyon and Elmore Leonard, with a dark undertow of real-life pain and disillusion. -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

It’s a brilliant book, a darling book. It is the blessedly modest chronicle of a magical consciousness that seems to have been born pulling diamonds out of the muck, hearing angels’ voices in the fiercest thunder… . I adored every word of this wondrous book. Get it. Read it. -Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun

In the tradition of … Rita Mae Brown and Amy Tan, Ms. Stapinski is an exciting writer, unabashedly candid, and at the same time unashamedly self-contained. Five-Finger Discount is a must-read. -Victoria Gotti, The New York Observer

What [Frank] McCourt did for Limerick, Ireland, Helene Stapinski does for Jersey City. -The Star-Ledger

Hugely entertaining. -The Sunday Times (London)