Author(s): Natalia Ginzburg

Novel | Translated fiction | Italy | Daunt Books Publishing

'If Ferrante is a friend, Ginzburg is a mentor.' - Guardian 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 sweet and mysterious cousin. When Nini takes a job in a factory and moves in with a city woman, Delia sees another way of being. But when she discovers she's pregnant, she agrees to marry the father, seduced by the promise of wealth and comfort. Nothing, not even Nini's desperate declaration of love, can stop her - but her rejection will be his undoing. The Road to the City is a short, poignant novel about the dreams of youth, and the cruelty it takes to make them come true.

Review: "The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original." -- Rachel Cusk
"I'm utterly entranced by Ginzburg's style-her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear. " -- Maggie Nelson
"Her prose style is deceptively simple and very complex. Its effect on the reader is both calming and thrilling-that's not so easy to do." -- Deborah Levy
"A bleak and smarting read, a remarkable debut." -- Naomi Huffman - New York Times
"Ginzburg's view of family is so unsentimental, it's visionary...The Road may be a small story about a small place, but Ginzburg's clarity lends grandeur to Delia's plight." -- Diane Josefowicz - Necessary Fiction
"The youngest of five, Ginzburg writes like someone used to being interrupted, precisely observing daily life with a sibling's affectionate revenge. Her work is marked by a kind of atmospheric pressure." -- Jessi Jezewska Stevens - 4Columns
"Ginzburg has an incredible talent for depicting explosive clashes within families, integrating insight and humour into her narrative...this lemon of a book invites one to take a bite, to relish the burn." -- Catherine Xinxin Yu - Asymptote Journal
"A blister of violence lurks tense beneath the words, the skin of it wearing thin, ready to be popped." -- Rhian Sasseen - LitHub

Author Biography: Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991), "who authored twelve books and two plays; who, because of anti-Semitic laws, sometimes couldn't publish under her own name; who raised five children and lost her husband to Fascist torture; who was elected to the Italian parliament as an independent in her late sixties-this woman does not take her present conditions as a given. She asks us to fight back against them, to be brave and resolute. She instructs us to ask for better, for ourselves and for our children" (Belle Boggs, The New Yorker). Gini Alhadeff won the 2018 Florio Prize for her translation of Fleur Jaeggy's I am the Brother of XX.