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 Medjugorje) amidst all that is beautiful and, equally, all that is terrible.. [This] kind of a reading experience is a pure gift from the author to us all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.