Renato After Alba is the astonishing sequel to the prize-winning book Renato, the Painter. Although it follows the earlier story, it is a stand-alone novel which can be read independently of the earlier work. Renato is an all too human, generous, loving (all too loving) flawed man, a painter with a first-rate talent and a second-rate career, “an artist who paints landscapes as if they were nudes, and nudes as if they were landscapes,” yes, that Renato, the family man whose wife, the beautiful Alba, has brought up not only their two children, but also the child he fathered out of wedlock, that same Renato who finally brought together his children, their mothers, his friends, his paintings, his everything, is now — ten years later — demolished by the unexpected death of his wife. A man of fragments but still an artist, he assembles a collage of scenes of life with and without Alba, recollections of his eccentric Sicilian-American family, encounters with well-meaning friends, daily attempts at resuming his former life, and metaphysical railings against any deity capable of destroying what it has created. In Renato After Alba, the deepest sorrow is not merely lacerating, outrageous, heart-rending, and tragic, but also, for someone so completely human as the enduring Renato, touchingly comic.