Where She Has Gone; A Novel

by Nino Ricci

• ISBN13: 9780312206819
• ISBN10: 031220681X
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 1999-07-30
• Publisher: Picador

Summary

In the final installment of Nino Ricci's acclaimed Vittorio Innocente trilogy, we find Ricci's hero Vittorio strangely drawn to his half-sister Rita. After a disturbing moment between them, he realizes that what he's been searching for is not just his sisterit's their shared history and secret burdens. At once a resolution of previous tensions and a luminous portrayal of discovery and absolution,Where She Has Gonecompletes a haunting trilogy of the immigrant experience. Nino Ricci's first novel,The Book of Saints,has been published in ten countries and was awarded aLos Angeles TimesBook Prize and the Canadian Governor General's Award for Fiction. His other books includeIn a Glass HouseandWhere She Has Gone. A past president of PEN Canada, Ricci lives in Toronto. This is the final installment in Nino Ricci's acclaimed Vittorio Innocente trilogy, which includesThe Book of Saints(1991) andIn a Glass House(1995). An Italian-born graduate student who grew up in Canada, Vittorio has just returned to Toronto after teaching in Africa. Here he reconnects with his half-sister Rita, who is in her first year of college, and eventually he finds himself strangely drawn to her. After a disturbing moment between them, Vittorio realizes that what he's been searching for is not just his sisterit's their shared history, their secret burdens. At once a resolution of previous tensions and a luminous portrayal of discovery and absolution,Where She Has Gonecompletes Ricci's haunting and widely praised trilogy of the immigrant experience. "Ricci has spun out a delicate and soulful novel . . . Miraculously fluid and well-shaped, the narrative unspools like a wavering dream."Pico Iyer,Time "Assured . . . An accomplished and moving work."Allen Lincoln,The New York Times Book Review "Sparkling . . . Well written and moving . . . A brilliant study of the way shame is passed down through generations."Roland Merullo,The Boston Globe "A magnificent novel . . . Beautifully balanced, expertly paced, and executed in a prose that's so sure, so smooth in its operations, so expressive, that it might be said to thrum with a natural life."Quill & Quire(starred review) "Ricci confirms the wide breadth, dizzying heights, and splendorous depths of his talent for telling a spellbinding tale."Toronto Star "One of the grand achievements of contemporary Canadian writing."Vancouver Sun "The search for family, truth, and identity drives the final installment of Ricci's trilogy about an Italian family transplanted to Canada . . . Ricci's poetic prose and fluid plot create a tense and beautiful story whose sad ironies achieve resolution in a haunting conclusion."Publishers Weekly "This third volume of a trilogy that began withThe Book of Saintscan be read alone, as the events of the previous books are smoothly integrated into the narrative, but it is far more powerful as a concluding volume. Ricci explores the immigrant's ambivalence concerning home and identity in a sensitive, compelling fashion."Library Journal "This beautifully written, quietly moving story impressively completes Italian-Canadian novelist Ricci's autobiographical trilogy. In [the two] previous installments, Ricci chronicled, in painstaking and often painful detail, the childhood and youth in the Italian village of Valle del Sole of Vittorio Innocente; his passage to North America with his mother Cristina, a disgraced adulteress who died while en route to a promised reconciliation with her betrayed husband; and the difficult adaptation to life in Toronto made by 'Victor' (his name now Anglicized), h

Author Biography

Nino Ricci's first novel, The Book of Saints, has been published in ten countries and was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Canadian Governor General's Award for Fiction. 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.

Table of Contents

"Assured . . . an accomplished and moving work."—The New York TImes Book Review

"Well written and moving . . . a brilliant study of the way shame is passed down through generations."—Roland Merullo, The Boston Globe

"Magnificent . . . executed in a prose that's so sure, so smooth in its operations, so expressive, that it might be said to thrum with a natural life."—Quill and Quire

"An extended work that rivals Pat Barker's . . . a saga . . . that is unrivaled in English."—Kirkus