A globe-spanning literary adventure about loss, love, nature, and the battle for human connection in the age of AI.
A lonely, intrepid fisherman. A one-legged pirate. A sacred fish. And the loneliest whale ever to live.
Welcome to the official website of Ronnie Vergnolle, author of The Book of Ribbner—a daring literary adventure that crosses oceans, continents, and the unseen boundary between the physical and the spiritual. At its center is Hannah Ribbner, a 33-year-old professional fisherman and photographer whose grief sends her back to the river of her childhood and into a prophecy that could alter humanity’s future.
From Sweden’s Umeålven River to the blue marlin grounds of Cape Verde, the Amazon Basin, the Seychelles, and the sacred waters of Bhutan, Hannah follows a trail of miracle, terror, love, and moral reckoning. Her destination is the Last Sacred Golden Mahseer. Her choice is devastatingly simple: kill the fish for the answer she longs to receive—or let it glide for the sake of a world losing its connection to nature, one another, and its own soul.
The Book of Ribbner is both an epic fishing story and a religious allegory for a rapidly changing world. It explores the cost of grief, the fusion of love, the sacred code of the fisherman, and the existential tension between carbon-based life and artificial intelligence. It asks what humanity must preserve before convenience, consumption, and machine logic sever the ancient bonds that make life meaningful.
Ronnie Vergnolle grew up barefoot in the South Carolina wilderness, where mountains, rivers, marshes, and coastlines first awakened his sense of wonder. After a career in law and entrepreneurship, he embarked on a three-year fishing journey to some of the world’s remotest waters. That search for reconnection became the genesis of The Book of Ribbner.
