Sleep

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.

NINO RICCI's first novel, Lives of the Saints, won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the F.G. Bressani Prize and was made into a motion picture starring Sophia Loren. The novel was also a long-time national bestseller, and was followed by the highly acclaimed In a Glass House and Where She Has Gone, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His bestselling novel Testament won the Trillium Book Award. His most recent novel The Origin of Species received the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction.  In total, his novels have appeared on 9 Best Book lists, including The New York Times and England’s Times Literary Supplement.
 
Nino Ricci has also won the Betty Trask Award for Fiction (UK), The Winnifred Holtby Prize (UK) and the 1992 Prise Contrepoint Madrineaux (France). Nino Ricci was recently named the L.G. Pathy '56 Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies at Princeton University and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Windsor as well the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.  He has been recognized with the Order of Canada for his contributions to literature as a renowned author. He lives in Toronto.