Nino Ricci

From multi-award winning author Nino Ricci comes a novel of devastating emotional power and intelligence, and often breathless suspense: the story of one man's descent into sleeplessness. David Pace is a man who has it all--a successful career as an almost-famous academic, a wife blessed with both beauty and brains, a young son and a lovely home. But David's brain has begun to misfire. It shuts off when David is meant to be awake--when he's writing, when he's lecturing, when he's driving--but otherwise denies him any rest at all. Popping a variety of pills at an increasingly alarming rate, David struggles to remain alert, but his efforts become less and less effective, leaving his family in tatters and his career on the brink. Then, almost by accident, David finds himself with a loaded gun in his hands, and all of a sudden he feels tantalizingly, gloriously awake. The sensation, fuelled by a steady mix of pharmaceuticals, launches David towards the extremes of human behaviour, and as his choices become more and more abhorrent and the risks he is willing take more and more dangerous, David's sense of what is real, who he is, and what he is capable of slips terrifyingly out of reach.

Sleep

a novel

The origin of species

Lives Of The Saints

Christina's affair with a mysterious stranger abruptly shatters the innocence of her son's childhood. As Vittorio tries to piece together the truth of his mother's crime, the reader is shown the hypocrisy and malice that lurks beneath the veneer of Catholicism in their small Italian village. 1990 winner of the Governor General's Award.

Lives of the Saints

Testament is a bold work of historical fiction. Set in a remote corner of the Roman Empire at a moment of political unrest and spiritual uncertainty, it retells the life of a holy man of enormous charisma who alters the course of human history. Grounded in extensive research, Testament vividly recreates first-century Palestine in elegant but accessible prose to explore the story of the man we know as Jesus. Ricci offers the story of Yeshua (Jesus) through the eyes and testimony of four fictional followers, reminiscent of yet utterly different from the Gospels, giving fresh perspective and a captivating narrative to an age-old story.

Testament

Set in the Valle del Sole, a village nestled in the folds of the Italian Apennines, Lives of the Saints tells the story of young Vittorio Innocente, and his mother, Cristina, whose affair with a blue-eyed stranger abruptly shatters the innocence of Vittorio's childhood. As he tries to piece together the truth of his mother's crime, we discover through Vittorio's eyes the underside of Valle del Sole's pastoral calm, the age-old superstitions and fears, vestiges of a pagan past, beneath the villagers' veneer of Catholicism, and the hypocrisy and malice beneath their self-rightousness.

A story of the life of a very human Jesus is told by four separate narrators; Yihuda of Qiryat (Judas Iscariot), Miryam of Migdal (Mary Magdalene), Miryam (Mary, Mother of Jesus), and a shepherd, Simon of Gergesa.

Love him or hate him, Pierre Trudeau has marked us all. The man whose motto was "reason over passion" managed to arouse in Canadians the fiercest of passions of every hue, ones that even today cloud our view of him and of his place in history. Acclaimed novelist Nino Ricci takes as his starting point the crucial role Trudeau played in the formation of his own sense of identity to look at how Trudeau expanded us as a people, not in spite of his contradictions but because of them.

Extraordinary Canadians Pierre Elliott Trudeau

Love him or hate him, Pierre Elliott Trudeau marked us all. The man whose motto was "Reason over passion" managed to arouse in Canadians fierce passions of every hue. Acclaimed novelist Nino Ricci begins with the crucial role Trudeau played in the formation of Ricci's own sense of identity in order to examine how he expanded us as a people, not in spite of his contradictions but because of them. Downplaying the perpetual rebel image that Trudeau crafted, Ricci reconstructs the charismatic prime minister as an almost Zelig-like figure. If his beliefs shifted radically over the years--from separatist to federalist, from fascist to liberal, from civil rights champion to military strongman--Trudeau always acted on deep convictions. Brilliantly argued and sensitively observed, Ricci's Trudeau is an unforgettable portrait of a memorable man.

After a harrowing voyage from Italy, during which his mother died, seven-year-old Vittorio arrives in Canada with his newborn half-sister, and is reunited with his estranged father, a dark, isolated, and angry figure he hardly knows. The story that follows spans two decades of Vittorio’s life within an immigrant Italian farming community in Southwestern Ontario, through his university years, and then into Africa where he goes to teach. At the centre of Vittorio’s existence is his strained relationship with his father and with his half-sister, Rita.In a Glass Houseis a haunting tale about perseverance and longed-for redemption. Ricci juxtaposes the intimate, complex world of family, with “its shadowy intricate web of alliances,” against the dislocations of the immigrant experience. The result is a richly textured and memorable novel. From the Hardcover edition.

In a Glass House

Winner of the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Fiction Montreal during the turbulent mid-1980s: Chernobyl has set Geiger counters thrumming across the globe, HIV/AIDS is cutting a deadly swath through the gay population worldwide, and locally, tempers are flaring over the recent codification of French as the official language of Quebec. Hiding out in a seedy apartment near campus, Alex Fratarcangeli (“Don’t worry. . . . I can’t even pronounce it myself”), an awkward, thirty-something grad student, is plagued by the sensation that his entire life is a fraud. Scarred by a distant father and a dangerous relationship with his ex Liz, and consumed by a floundering dissertation linking Darwin’s theory of evolution with the history of human narrative, Alex has come to view love and other human emotions as “evolutionary surplus, haphazard neural responses that nature had latched onto for its own insidious purposes.” When Alex receives a letter from Ingrid, the beautiful woman he knew years ago in Sweden, notifying him of the existence of his five-year-old son, he is gripped by a paralytic terror. Whenever Alex’s thoughts grow darkest, he recalls Desmond, the British professor with dubious credentials whom he met years ago in the Galapagos. Treacherous and despicable, wearing his ignominy like his rumpled jacket, Desmond nonetheless caught Alex in his thrall and led him to some life-altering truths during their weeks exploring Darwin’s islands together. It is only now that Alex can begin to comprehend these unlikely life lessons, and see a glimmer of hope shining through what he had thought was meaninglessness.

A Novel

The Origin of Species

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Canadian Governor General's Award for Fiction Set in a small, golden village nestled in folds of the Italian Apennines, The Book of Saints is a deceptively simple novel of startling power and mythic dimension. Young Vittorio Innocente is the pampered son of Cristina, a women whose husband has left Italy for work in North America. Beneath her placid surface, Cristina yearns to escape the restrictive village; and, one day, Vittorio is startled to find her in the family's stable, her ankle swelling from a snakebite. But what really happened to Cristina that day becomes the center of this tale—a story of passion and superstition beneath pastoral calm, a mother's secret life witnessed by a child. The first novel in a trilogy that follows Vittorio to adulthood, The Book of Saints is Ricci's acclaimed debut.

The Book of Saints

After a harrowing voyage from Italy, during which his mother died, seven-year-old Vittorio arrives in Canada with his newborn half-sister, and is reunited with his estranged father, a dark, isolated, and angry figure he hardly knows. The story that follows spans two decades of Vittorio’s life within an immigrant Italian farming community in Southwestern Ontario, through his university years, and then into Africa where he goes to teach. At the centre of Vittorio’s existence is his strained relationship with his father and with his half-sister, Rita. In a Glass House is a haunting tale about perseverance and longed-for redemption. Ricci juxtaposes the intimate, complex world of family, with “its shadowy intricate web of alliances,” against the dislocations of the immigrant experience. The result is a richly textured and memorable novel.

Set in Toronto and Italy, this powerful sequel to In a Glass House explores the sometimes forbidden aspect of desire and one’s longing for what is unrecoverable. Victor Innocente remeets his half-sister in Toronto, shortly after his father’s death. Uneasy with their new proximity in each other’s lives, they are at first restrained. But gradually what is unspoken between them comes closer to the surface, setting in motion a course of events that will take Victor back to Valle del Sole in Italy, the place of his birth. It is there, where the story had its strange beginning twenty years earlier, that he confronts his past, its secrets and its revelations. Poignant, gripping, and written in luminous, highly charged prose, Where She Has Gone is an unforgettable novel – for its vivid portrayal of character and place, and for its extraordinarily moving encounter with the past.

Nino Ricci

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