Natalia Ginzburg

Anna, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a small town in northern Italy, after a brief romance finds herself pregnant. To save her reputation, she marries an eccentric older family friend, and they move to his village in the south. Her relationship with Cenzo Rena is touched by tragedy and grace as the events of their life in the countryside run parallel...

'The places, events and people are all real. I have invented nothing.' Natalia Ginzburg wrote her masterful, Strega Prize-winning novel Family Lexicon while living in London in the 1960s. Homesick for her big, noisy Italian family, she summoned them in this novel, which is a celebration of the routines and rituals, in-jokes and insults, and above all, the repeated sayings...

Dear Michele, she wrote, I'm writing principally to tell you that your father is sick. Go visit him. He says he hasn’t seen you for days. Michele is the beloved only son of a large, dysfunctional family in 1970s Italy. Headstrong and independent, he has disappeared to London without explanation. Back in Italy, his father lies dying. Michele's departure sets...

The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: 'I shot him between the eyes.' As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and revenge—proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg's writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the...

Delia is one of five children, growing up in a poor Italian village. She is 17 and dreams of marrying a rich man; she dreams of a grand apartment in the city and silk stockings. To escape her father's neglect and her mother's sadness, she begins to take the dusty road to the city every day, accompanied by Nini, her...

Architect Carmine and translator Ivana were once lovers. Their child died and their relationship ended but now, decades on, both with marriages and children of their own, they are friends. During a bout of pneumonia, Carmine—uneasy in his life of aspiration and materialism—begins to look back over opportunities missed and choices made. Set against postwar social breakdown, the melancholic, quietly...

'So there is no one to whom I can speak the words that most need to be spoken, about the events which most closely concern our family and what has happened to us; I have to keep them bottled up inside me and there are times when they threaten to choke me.' Valentino is the spoiled child of doting parents...

At long last she was playing the role she had always dreamt about, that of a mother, full of anxious solicitude, preparing to confide her daughter into the hands of a young man with good intentions, good prospects and a good character. A mother decides to follow her daughter to the city. She settles in the suburbs with her older...

Giuseppe is leaving his flat in the city of Rome, where he has lived for more than twenty years, to go and live with his brother in America. He must say goodbye to his cousin Roberta; to his former lover Lucrezia and her husband Piero; and to all his friends who used to gather for weekends at Le Margherite, Lucrezia's...

In a hushed, Italian town after the Second World War, Elsa lives with her parents in the house where she was born. Twenty-seven and unmarried, she is of constant concern to her mother, whose status anxiety manifests itself in acute hypochondria. Elsa hopes to live a life different to the one she's always known, and when she meets Tommasino, it...

As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones... So begins the titular essay in Natalia Ginzburg's extraordinary collection, which takes little subjects - shoes, meatballs, moneyboxes - and turns them into subjects of great significance. Whether she writes of the loss of a friend, the...

Two novellas about domestic life, isolation, and the passing of time by one of the finest Italian writers of the twentieth century. Family and Borghesia presents two captivating stories that delve into the intricacies of human connection and the inexorable passage of time. In Family, Carmine, an architect, and Ivana, a translator, once shared a life together and even had...