Lives of the Saints

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 tale—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.