Lecture, Nino Ricci, The Origin of Species

"A writer as gifted as Ricci can tackle almost any subject and succeed with it." -Kirkus Reviews

Set in Montreal during the 1980s—a decade fraught with the continuing clashes between French-Canadians and English-Canadians and the ensuing crises of identity—The Origin of Species tells the story of Alex, a thirty-something man plagued by a familiar sense of being a fraud in all aspects of life. He is by all accounts unexceptional, save for the fact that he is haunted by an extraordinary experience in the Galapagos Islands, the consequences of which threaten to upend the precarious balance of his ordinary life.

Nino Ricci is one of the foremost figures of contemporary Canadian literature and a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. His first novel, Lives of the Saints, formed the first volume of a trilogy that was completed by In a Glass House and Where She Has Gone. A past president of the Canadian Centre of International PEN, The Origin of Species is his fifth novel. Ricci lives in Toronto.

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Photo, Paul-Antoine Taillefe