October 5, 2026 at 7:00PM
New Canaan Library (with Elm Street Books)
151 Main Street
New Canaan, CT 06840
Actor and director Ed Burns returns with the continuing fictionalized saga of growing up on Marlboro Road, where a teenager’s idyllic summer of freedom is shaded by the growing weight of responsibility and a recognition of the fallibility of the adults around him.
The Guardian called Burns’s first novel, A Kid from Marlboro Road, “keenly felt…vivid…a tender-hearted complement to the Irish-American stories that Burns captures in his films.” In his second Marlboro Road novel, Burns continues the tale, loosely based on his own childhood. The boy that was twelve in the first novel is now fourteen, about to turn fifteen, when he will enter an all-boys Catholic High School. He spends a lot more time with his best friends, Mark, T-Mac, Zeppo, Louie, and Cakes than he does with his given family.
For all their newfound freedom, the kids find the larger world of Valley Stream and the neighboring towns more dangerous than they’re prepared for, where dads can hurt you when they reveal their own emotional scars and the local beach might be ruled by gangs of older kids you might have to defend yourself from. The Marlboro Road Gang is a novel where darker currents start to invade the innocent pastorale of childhood, and where a boy might lose his bearings in the confusion.
Elm Street Books will be on site for book sales and signing.
Born in Woodside, Queens and raised on Long Island, Ed Burns has made fourteen feature films as a writer-director-actor and starred in many, including Saving Private Ryan. Burns’ first film, The Brothers McMullen, premiered at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, winning the Grand Jury prize. In 2024 he published his debut novel, A Kid from Marlboro Road, the first in a series based on his childhood memories and the local story of Irish Americans in New York City and Long Island. Burns lives in New York City with his wife and two children.