Lives of the Saints - Softcover

Nino Ricci

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0920953255 ISBN 13: 9780920953259

Publisher: Knopf, 1990

Synopsis

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Canadian Governor General's Award for Fiction

Set in a small, golden village nestled in folds of the Italian Apennines, The Book of Saints is a deceptively simple novel of startling power and mythic dimension. Young Vittorio Innocente is the pampered son of Cristina, a women whose husband has left Italy for work in North America. Beneath her placid surface, Cristina yearns to escape the restrictive village; and, one day, Vittorio is startled to find her in the family's stable, her ankle swelling from a snakebite. But what really happened to Cristina that day becomes the center of this taleā€”a story of passion and superstition beneath pastoral calm, a mother's secret life witnessed by a child. The first novel in a trilogy that follows Vittorio to adulthood, The Book of Saints is Ricci's acclaimed debut.

About this title

About the Author:

The three novels that form his Vittorio Innocente trilogy—The Book of Saints, In a Glass House, and Where She Has Gone—are all available from Picador. A past president of PEN Canada, he lives in Toronto.

From Library Journal:

This first novel of Italian-Canadian writer Ricci is the story of a seven-year-old Italian peasant boy, aptly named Vittorio Innocenti, and his loss of innocence as he tries to piece together the shadowy clues to his mother's mysterious affair and his family's loss of favor in the tiny Apennine village of Valle de Sol. The characters--the boy, his mother, his grandfather, the villagers--and the storyline are predictable, but the atmosphere, seen through the eyes of the boy, is obscure and occasionally disturbing, revealing the inbred, pre-Christian darkness of supposedly modern Italian village life. Recommended.
- Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0920953255
• ISBN 13: 9780920953259
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 238