In a Glass House - Hardcover

Nino Ricci was born in Canada of Italian parentage, and hold both Canadian and Italian nationality. After completing studies at York University in Toronto he taught for four years at a boarding school in Nigeria, then travelled widely though Africa and Europe. He completed graduate studies at Concordia University in Montreal, where he subsequently taught literature and creative writing, and at the University of Florence. He is currently an active member of Canadian PEN. Based in Toronto, Ricci now writes full-time, and has published short stories, articles and reviews. Lives of the Saints, his first novel, won Canada's most prestigious literary prize, the Governor General's Award, as well as the W. H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and a Betty Trask Award.

This sequel to the well-received The Book of Saints again follows the Innocente family, here having left Italy to settle in a Canadian farming community called Mersea on the shores of Lake Erie. Unlike the previous novel, however, this one has only mixed success. The tale is nicely wrought and lovingly written, but it suffers from a thin plot and a morass of self-analysis from its narrator, Vittorio. In 1961, when the novel opens, Vittorio is seven; he and his illegitimate half-sister, Rita, have joined Vittorio's moody father, a greenhouse keeper, who hates the infant Rita because she reminds him of his faithless wife. Vittorio hopes desperately to make a connection with his father, who only withdraws further, living at such a remove from his surroundings that he rarely speaks even to his children. Vittorio's attempts to connect elsewhere, either in Mersea's Italian community or in the surrounding Canadian culture, meet with rejection or misunderstanding. Yet he slowly navigates through the elements of his life, gaining perspective, finding a girlfriend, attending college and traveling to Africa. Rita finally escapes from the family with an awful ruse, better left unrevealed. In places, Ricci tells his tale beautifully, but he seems to have fallen under the spell of his own prose, which, like the protagonist, turns in upon itself a little too deeply.
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