New Releases by Nino Ricci

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.

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.

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.

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.

A fictional biography of the earthly life of Jesus told from the perspectives of four fascinating figures, by the author of Where She Has Gone. In powerful accounts colored by their own beliefs and devices, the following men and women tell the captivating story: Yihuda of Qiryat (Judas Iscariot), a freedom fighter working for Rome''s overthrow who is drawn to the charismatic teacher; Miryam of Migdal (Mary Magdeline), a disciple who finds in Jesus'' presence the intellectual stimulation that society has denied her. Miryam (Mary), the mother of Jeus, who has a complex relationship with her precocious son, and Simon of Gergesa, a plainspoken shepherd who travels to Jerusalem and witnesses the last days of the Jewish preacher. With exquisite detail, Nino Ricci offers a provocative portrait of the historical Jesus, an ordinary man living in a time of political turmoil and spiritual uncertainty. Praise for Testament "A hypnotic, deeply lyrical presentation of four gospels . . . . A writer of impeccable craft . . . recreating, in his incantatory prose, the very aroma and the wild, sorcery-filled world through which Jesus walked." —Pico Iyer, Los Angeles Times Book Review "A fantastic storyteller . . . an unsettling book . . . The four narrators Ricci creates are exceptionally well drawn and brilliantly infused with the details of their time." —Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor "The portrait of a difficult, alienated, but compassionate and charismatic intellectual and religious rebel . . . The character that emerges is complex, compelling, and achingly heroic." —Christine Wald-Hopkins, Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News

Set in a tiny Italian village, dark, lyrical, hypnotic first novel.