Lives Of The Saints Books

Set in the Valle del Sole, a village nestled in the folds of the Italian Apennines, Lives of the Saints tells the story of young Vittorio Innocente, and his mother, Cristina, whose affair with a blue-eyed stranger abruptly shatters the innocence of Vittorio's childhood. As he tries to piece together the truth of his mother's crime, we discover through Vittorio's eyes the underside of Valle del Sole's pastoral calm, the age-old superstitions and fears, vestiges of a pagan past, beneath the villagers' veneer of Catholicism, and the hypocrisy and malice beneath their self-rightousness.

This is the second novel in Nino Ricci's Vittorio Innocente trilogy, following the award-winning The Book of Saints . As the young Italian boy Vittorio Innocente arrives in the New World, leaving the arms of his dying mother for the troubled haven of his father, he and his half-sister Rita must make their way in a farming community whose ways are both magical and forbidding.

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 sister—it'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 Gone completes a haunting trilogy of the immigrant experience.