New Releases by Nino Ricci

From multi-award winning author Nino Ricci comes a novel of devastating emotional power and intelligence, and often breathless suspense--now in paperback. 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 toward 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.

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.

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.

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

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.