For four years, Salvatore Scibona has been shepherding new writers at the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown through readings of their work at local libraries and other cultural venues.

Saturday at 5:30 p.m., at the West Tisbury library, Mr. Scibona will read from The End, his own first novel, that already has generated luxurious reviews prior to its release this week. Responsible reviewers have compared him with Saul Bellow, Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene.

The End is a novel set in an immigrant Italian enclave in Ohio, near Cleveland, where Mr. Scibona was raised. During a local carnival, Rocco LaGrassa receives word that his son has died in a POW camp in Korea. The book chronicles that one day but circles back to uncover 30 years of history leading to the moment, viewed from the perspective of the book’s six characters, including a nonagenarian abortionist, an enigmatic seamstress, a sullen teenager and a jeweler.

The End, published by Graywolf Press, is a novel of lives and ideas, as Mr. Scibona described his work in a phone interview this week. “The idea came, in fact, from a description I was writing about a man climbing a flight of stairs. There was a door at the top and a woman behind the door. The remainder of the book evolved over 10 years. I wrote most of it on the Cape,” he said.

Mr. Scibona regards novelist Bellow as an important influence. “If there is any comparison with Bellow, I hope it relates to the passionate relationships his characters had with ideas, and about life. He did not separate life from ideas,” Mr. Scibona said.