Nino Ricci

Vittorio Innocente, a Canadian born in Italy, meets his half-sister, Rita, in Toronto shortly after his father's death. Uneasy with their new proximity in each other's lives, he and Rita at first maintain the awkward distance that has always characterized his family life. But after a moment of disturbing connection between them, Rita leaves Canada for Europe. Her departure sets in motion a course of events that will take Vittorio back to Valle del Sole, the place of his birth. And when they meet again in this small Appenine village, where his story had its start two decades before, he finds at last that it is not only his sister he has been seeking - it is their shared history, their secret burdens.

Nino Ricci's first novel, The Book of Saints, was accorded high critical acclaim and popular success for its haunting portrayal of a young Italian boy's view of his mother's fall from grace. This second novel follows Ricci's young hero, Vittorio Innocente, from Italy to the New World, and from the arms of his mother into the uncomfortable haven of a family he hardly knows and a country whose every feature feels alien to him. Living under the watch of his troubled father, a greenhouse-keeper, Victor and his younger half-sister, Rita, come of age in a farming community whose ways are both magical and mysteriously forbidding. Ricci is a writer gifted with the ability to summon memorable images and characters: the delicate paradise of a greenhouse, the loneliness of a man who cannot voice his feelings, and the slow flowering of a young man's intelligence from the soil of his family into a larger world.

In mid-1980's Montreal Alex Fratarcangeli hides out in a seedy apartment near the Concordia campus, a somewhat oafish 30-something grad student. Though tender and generous at heart, Alex leads a life devoid of healthy relationships. Alex attends daily sessions with a lackluster psychoanalyst in an attempt to shake off the demon of depression. Whenever Alex's thoughts grow darkest, he is compelled to recall Desmond, the British professor with dubious credentials whom he met years ago in the Galapagos. 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.