“Ricci’s darkest and most thematically daring work to date. . . . A frightening and essential addition to the oeuvre of one of this country’s best and most important writers.” – Quill & Quire
◊ Winner of the Canadian Authors Award for Fiction ◊
◊ A Toronto Star Top 5 Book ◊
◊ A Globe and Mail Best Book ◊
◊ A National Post Best Book ◊
◊ A National Bestseller ◊
Praise for Sleep
“A page-turner bound to please the award-winning writer’s wide audience. . . . Sleep may be Ricci’s best book to date.” – London Free Press
“A dark but gripping read that does not let up.” – CBC News
“One of Ricci’s most deeply felt novels . . . and one of his riskiest.” – National Post
“If endemic narcissism is one of the central pathologies of contemporary culture, then Ricci has crafted with Sleep one of its holy texts.” – Toronto Star
From multi-award winning author Nino Ricci comes a novel of harrowing emotional power and suspense, the story of one man’s descent into sleeplessness.
David Pace is a man who seems to have it all – a successful career as an almost-famous academic, a wife blessed with both beauty and brains, a young son and a lovely home. It is only when he comes down with a rare sleep disorder that the careful lies he has stitched together to form his perfect life begin to unravel. As sleep both haunts him and eludes him he descends into a twilight world that leaves his family in tatters and his career on the brink. Then he finds himself with a loaded gun in his hands, and all of a sudden he feels tantalizingly, gloriously awake.
Fuelled by a steady mix of pharmaceuticals, David’s desperate quest to get free of the fog his disorder has plunged him into pushes him towards the very extremes of human behaviour. As he takes ever greater risks and makes ever more destructive choices his sense of what is real and who he is and what he is capable of begins to slip terrifyingly out of reach.
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