The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke is a hilarious and memorable first novel about youth and passion, family and community, miracles and violence and baseball. This moving love story, also a richly imagined chapter of Toronto history, begins on a summer afternoon in 1933, when Lucio Burke knocks a great ungainly bird out of the Toronto sky with a single perfect throw of a baseball. Thus it is that Lucio, a careful seventeen-year-old whose father died the night he was born, is drawn out of himself and into a complicated world.