In Bruno’s Shadow

As a tsunami in South-East Asia kills three hundred thousand and Pope John Paul II lies dying, the lives of eight people in Rome are transformed by a Croatian housekeeper named Dubravka, who was betrayed in love and later witness to a miracle at the site of apparitions of the Virgin Mary. The stories of the North Americans and Italians she encounters interconnect and alternate with key episodes from Dubravka’s life as she struggles to resolve her personal concerns as well as the contradictions in her Catholic faith while working at a pensione in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori in the shadow of the statue of the martyred visionary Giordano Bruno.
  — Guernica World Editions

"If you’re looking for a book set in Roma, Centro Storico, In Bruno’s Shadow could be for you. Plus additional locations of Dubrovnik, Mostar, and Medugorje. . . [The novel] brings all of those locations, each vivid with characters, activities, and situations, while Rome is also peopled with an additional crowd at play and at work, a character providing street performance as the great and violent Caravaggio, a vivid gaggle of vendors and buskers crowding streets and fountains, an American couple, other tourists alone and in groups, guides and locals (clergy and otherwise), bereaved parents, eccentric professors, and many more, even a fictional character from a film by Krzysztof Kieslowski, a colorful and diverse cast, each following their own star, living lives of purpose, their sufferings and ambitions a flashing kaleidoscope of times and places. All of the sumptuous action and setting of this novel delivered in words, words written in a fluent, steady, knowledgeable voice, precise and determined, not infrequently providing billowing paragraphs, phrase after gathering phrase in a fountain of details and description. . . . Such prose, such fiction as In Bruno’s Shadow suggests not only film in its intense visuality but also painting and music in its colorful percussive detail as well as poetry."
  — Voices in Italian Americana

"A master wordsmith, Ardizzone combines sophisticated philosophical thinking with succinct descriptions of art, architecture, and nature. Compelling dialogue as well as narrative that’s smooth and pleasing to the eye and ear demonstrate that he remains one of Italian America’s best storytellers."
  — Fra Noi

"A true masterpiece with all the beauty of Ardizzone’s previous work, yet so very unique. In Bruno’s Shadow catapults readers to a full immersion in Rome (as well as Dubrovnik and Medugorje) amidst all that is beautiful and, equally, all that is terrible…. [This} kind of reading experience is a pure gift from the author to us all."
  — Ovunque Siamo

"An exquisite novel, elegantly written, as well as compassionate and exact in its observations of its characters’ moments of grace and connection. Kaleidoscopic and immersive, In Bruno’s Shadow is a truly international novel brimming with incidents at once magical and wholly plausible."
  — Christine Sneed

"Rome is mother of exiles and outcasts in Tony Ardizzone’s In Bruno’s Shadow. Both a spiritual journey and a political inquiry, this remarkable novel presents Rome as a character in itself. Fittingly, the city’s divine architecture shapes the book’s action. Each chapter forms a madonella, a street shrine in which Ardizzone’s diverse pilgrims confess their sins and express their hopes."
  — Anthony Di Renzo

"OK, this novel is brilliant. I marvelled at the depth and complexity of feeling and history, and the faith that permeates the text. Actually, brilliant, as in diamonds, doesn’t say it; say magnitude, like in stars."
  — David Bradley

"A novel of great complexity infused with empathy and insight, where matters of the spirit are anchored securely within a framework of American contemporary realism. With a menagerie of travelers crisscrossing superimposed maps of Rome and Dubrovnik, its themes — the space between the rational and the mystery, and the deathly conflict between free thought and thinking deemed heretical — make In Bruno’s Shadow a novel for this moment."
  — Adria Bernardi

"A heart-rending and intricate novel that unfurls from one woman’s fleeting encounters with strangers in an exquisitely rendered Rome. In Bruno’s Shadow delves into the questions that shape our lives in ways that are profound, moving, and at times downright funny."
  — Gerri Brightwell