Author(s): Alba de Cespedes (translated by Anne Goldstein)

Novel | Translated fiction | Italy

Out running errands, Valeria Cossati gives in to a sudden impulse - she buys a shiny black notebook. Hiding it from her husband and children, she begins to record and scrutinise her life, writing of the daily domestic routine, her children's struggles in love and minor rifts in her marriage.

Gradually, the solid structure of her family life crumbles away, and Valeria discovers the dissatisfaction that has been lurking behind her devotion to her family for years.

Forbidden Notebook is a rediscovered classic of Italian literature, published here in a new translation by the celebrated Ann Goldstein and with an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri. Written with sharp clarity and insight, it is a haunting story of domestic discontent, and of one woman's powerful reckoning with her own life.

'Mind blown...this book is the female Stoner!' - Mia Levitin

'One of Italy's most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked writers' - Jhumpa Lahiri

Review: 'Feels strikingly contemporary... a newly rediscovered classic of Italian literature that draws an arc between the domestic and political, and between women of decades past and now' - New Statesman, Best books of 2023

Author Biography: Alba de Cespedes (1911-97) was a bestselling Cuban-Italian novelist, poet and screenwriter. The granddaughter of the first President of Cuba, de Cespedes was raised in Rome. Married at 15 and a mother by 16, she did not begin her writing career until after her divorce at the age of 20. She worked as a journalist throughout the 1930s while also taking an active part in the Italian partisan struggle, and was twice jailed for her anti-fascist activities. After the fall of fascism, she founded the literary journal Mercurio and went on to become one of Italy's most successful and most widely translated authors. The Best of Husbands is also forthcoming from Pushkin Press.