Nino Ricci - The Origin of Species

Praise forthe origin of species

In this winner of the Governor Generals Award for fiction, Alex, a young Italian Canadian in 1980s Montreal, achingly needs to write, to talk, to make order of his life and of the clutter of information he has accumulated. He also wants a girlfriend. Because Ricci is a skilled, language-loving writer, Alexs life as a skilled, language-loving writer is a rich journey.

Globe 100 Best Books

Most memorable among the novels virtuoso set pieces are a stunning heart-of-darkness episode in the Galpagos and a conjunction of storytelling and evolutionary survival involving the courtship ritual of the masked booby. Deconstruction is relatively easy, Riccis book tells us; what is heroic is our struggle to construct, to change and evolve, to be loving and compassionate, and to tell each other stories of hope.

Quill & Quire

Told in windowpane prose, this story reads as if it has come up through our collective memory. With the shock of recognition, we gain a new understanding of our fragility and our strength.

~ Governor Generals Award Jury Citation ~

Riccis masterstroke to date. This novel does so well, on so many levels, that its hard to know where to begin tallying up the riches An ambitious, thrilling novel that resists encapsulation and takes not a single misstep it is also bitterly, achingly funny.

Toronto Star

The Origin of Species is a profoundly moving novel that lovingly creates a world of flawed but very real characters.

Winnipeg Free Press

An entertaining and emotionally rewarding read, this book will transport Nino Ricci to further heights of literary stardom and could well overtake his first, Lives of the Saints, as his signature workmuch as the original Origin of Species did to the career and life of Charles Darwin.

Ottawa Citizen

Praise forlives of the saints

This is a marvelously told story, unbearably poignant I can hardly think of a book I have enjoyed more this year.

J USTIN C ARTWRIGHT , The Telegraph

Extraordinary and dazzling.

Times Literary Supplement

An impressive debut more will be heard from this author.

The Guardian

[Nino Ricci] has written a first novel with hardly a false note.

The Observer

Lives of the Saints is simple, moving, and compelling.

The Spectator

A beautifully paced and measured first novel an extraordinary storybrooding and ironic, suffused with yearning, tender and lucid and gritty perfect pitch and brilliant descriptive powers.

New York Times Book Review

Nino Riccis complex and skillfully fashioned tale of life in an Italian Apennine village offers pleasure too seldom present in contemporary fiction: full and involving characterizations, an exhilarating combination of tightly knit plot and episodic looseness, and a rich sense of lives lived truly communally, in conflict and in balance with one another exudes a dazzling breadth and richness.

USA Today

A book to celebratea wise, poignant, and poised novel.

Wall Street Journal

A fine, artful piece of work a powerful tale.

Washington Post

This seems to me to be literature at its best, a sense of life lived, a sense of life felt, not without dreams, not without poetry, but without fakery.

Toronto Star

In a forgotten village lost to time and the world, Nino Ricci unfolds a tragedy of nearly mythic proportions.

Le Monde

Praise forin a glass house

Splendidly, even forcefully written, this is a novel which nags at the soul.

Glasgow Herald

Compelling in its artistry [Ricci is] an extraordinarily subtle writer.

The Guardian

Ricci has written a profound essay on the human soul.

Sunday Telegraph

Full of sensitive, insightful writing a strongly voiced and engaging book Riccis observations about family dynamics are frequently elegant.

Boston Sunday Globe

Lyrical.

Los Angeles Times

A superbly sad story Nino Riccis triumph.

Washington Post

In A Glass House is a haunting, lyrical, intelligent coming-of-age novel the acuity of its observations, the eloquence of its prose, and the hard-earned wisdom of its final pages make it a genuine achievement.

New York Times Book Review

Praise forwhere she has gone

A superb stylist whose unpretentious prose carries an emotional charge that gathers so slowly and surely that were surprised to find ourselves so moved by his characters stoically borne crises.

Kirkus Reviews

Riccis poetic prose and fluid plot create a tense and beautiful story whose sad ironies achieve resolution in a haunting conclusion.

Publishers Weekly

Ricci has spun out a delicate and soulful novel.

TIME

Outstanding the work of a writer arrived at startling maturity The novels language and rhythms are quietly extraordinary, both loose-limbed and intense, moving with fluid grace between the sharp here and now of Toronto or rural Italy and the brooding landscape of Victors mind vibrant with life.

Times Literary Supplement

Ricci manipulates our expectations with an adept, steady hand.

Time Out London

Absorbing and moving.

Sunday Times

The smooth surface of Riccis prose belies the novels richness as it builds surely and lucidly toward a poignant, bittersweet conclusion: Riccis exploration of the rupture between old world and new is masterful.

The Observer

Praise fortestament

In the beauty of its language, its rich detail of place and character, its humanity and grace and sense of wonder, Nino Riccis Testament both transcends and revalidates the so-called historical novel. Religion aside, history aside, this is a lovely work of fiction.

T IM OB RIEN , author of July, July

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.

P ICO I YER , Los Angeles Times Book Review

Nino Ricci pulls off a genuine tour-de-force. Testaments last fifty pages are grisly, wrenching, and utterly absorbingYeshuas all-too-human suffering and death have a real and terrible power, unrelieved by lightning flashes of divinity or miraculous interventions.

Washington Post

Testament is a remarkable retelling of the Jesus story, doing what great art always doesmaking what is familiar suddenly fresh, daring, challenging. You will never think of the characters of the gospel accounts in the same way again, which is the good news of this stunning novel.

R EVEREND S TEPHEN K ENDRICK , senior minister, First and Second Church, Boston

The sum of these various reminiscences makes a highly readable narrative There is, moreover, an element of suspense that is sustained throughout the novel despiteor even because ofthe universally known outcome of Jesuss career.

Toronto Star

Ricci has given us a contemporary Jesus. Like a palimpsest, with each fresh image superimposed on earlier images, Riccis Jesus testifies to the inexhaustible power of story, reminding us that enduring myths are not windows through which we view objective truths, but mirrors framing our own evanescent mortality and morality plays.