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.

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."

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.

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.

From Governor General’ s Award-winner Nino Ricci, one of Canada’s most highly acclaimed literary voices, 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 re-tells the life of a holy man of enormous charisma who alters the course of human history. Grounded in extensive research, and written with the poetic sensibility that has earned Ricci an international reputation, Testament vividly re-creates first-century Palestine in elegant but accessible prose to explore the story of the man we know as Jesus. Testament at once distances us from the familiar accounts by using Hebrew and Aramaic names. Moreover, he 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. - Yihuda of Qiryat (Judas Iscariot) is a rebel freedom fighter working for Rome’s overthrow, who sees Yeshua come in from the desert. He is drawn to him; and yet he is full of doubt, always an outsider, too intellectual to simply accept and be accepted. “Tell me your secret,” he thinks, “make me new.” - Miryam of Migdal (Mary Magdalene), whose family make a living curing fish, is captivated by the way Jesus includes her among his followers, who he encourages to ask questions and challenge him. For this woman, kept back by society from intellectual stimulation, he “reached inside me with his words to touch the inmost part of me.” - Yeshua’s mother Miryam tells us plainly that he was the result of a rape by a Roman legate; she was forced to marry an old man named Yehoceph, and give birth in his rough lodgings. Her eldest son quickly set himself apart from his siblings. She shows how he learned from different teachers, always quick to challenge received knowledge. - Finally, we read the account of Simon of Gergesa, a Greek shepherd who sees Jesus with hundreds of followers on a hill across the lake, and comes to the shore to hear him. "This was strange enough, for a Jew, to come out in search of us Syrians and Greeks." Simon, who finds great sense in Jesus’ teachings, relates to us the last days of the Jewish preacher.

The Journey Prize Anthology, in this ninth edition, brings together the finest new voices in Canadian fiction, and has established itself as the premier anthology of emerging writers in this country. This edition includes twelve exciting and wide-ranging stories. Among them: In a haunting story, an elderly woman is enveloped in the disturbance and dislocation of a physical ailment as she confronts the memory of a deep personal loss suffered decades ago; the emotional equilibrium of a family shaken when a child brings wrongful punishment upon her older sister, foreshadowing tragedy in the world war to come; in an urban tale, written in powerful, idiomatic prose, a Guyanese immigrant looks back on the trials and tribulations of his first years in Canada when he shared an apartment in Toronto with two friends; faced with the loss of her father in a tragic accident, a young girl attempts to gain control of the world by imagining she can change reality with the strength of her will; a woman vividly recreates the day of her own birth when her mother, two weeks overdue, and a group of gossipy relatives assemble for a baby shower; hidden wounds from wartime are torn open when relatives from Germany spend their vacation with family in Canada during the summer of the Munich Olympics. The co-winners of the $10,000 Journey Prize for 1997 were Gabriella Goliger for “Maladies of the Inner Ear” and Anne Simpson for “Dreaming Snow.”

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