The Church of Solitude tells the story of Maria Concezione, a young Sardinian seamstress living with breast cancer at the cusp of the twentieth century. Overwhelmed by the shame of her diagnosis, she decides that no one can know what has happened to her, but the heavy burden of this secrecy changes her life in dramatic ways and almost causes the destruction of several people in her life. This surprising novel paints the portrait of a woman facing the unknown with courage, faith, and self-reliance, and is the last and most autobiographical work of Grazia Deledda, who died of breast cancer in...
The Church of Solitude tells the story of Maria Concezione, a young Sardinian seamstress living with breast cancer at the cusp of the twentieth centur...
The novel begins with Costantino Ledda's conviction and sentencing for the murder of his cruel uncle. Though innocent of the crime, he accepts the guilty verdict as punishment for marrying Giovanna Era through a civil ceremony rather than an expensive church wedding. When her husband is taken away, Giovanna has no way to provide for herself, her mother, and her son, who soon dies of malnutrition. Out of desperation she divorces Costantino, according to a new law for wives of convicts, and marries a wealthy but brutish landowner. When the true murderer confesses and Costantino returns, he and...
The novel begins with Costantino Ledda's conviction and sentencing for the murder of his cruel uncle. Though innocent of the crime, he accepts the gui...
Winner of the 1926 Novel Prize for Literature After serving time in mainland Italy for a minor theft, Elias Portolu returns home to Nuoro, in rural Sardinia. Lonely and vulnerable after his prison exile, he falls in love with his brother's fiancee. But he finds himself trapped by social and religious strictures, his passion and guilt winding into a spiral of anguish and paralyzing indecision. For guidance he turns first to the village priest, who advises him to resist temptation; then he turns to the pagan "father of the woods," who recognizes the weakness of human will and urges him to...
Winner of the 1926 Novel Prize for Literature After serving time in mainland Italy for a minor theft, Elias Portolu returns home to Nuoro, in rura...
1928. The Mother is an unusual book, both in its story and its setting in a remote Sardinian hill village, half civilized and superstitious. But the chief interest lies in the psychological study of the two chief characters, and the action of the story takes place so rapidly (all within the space of two days) and the actual drama is so interwoven with the mental conflict, and all so forced by circumstances, that it is almost Greek in its simple and inevitable tragedy. The book is written without offense to any creed or opinions, and touches on no questions of either doctrine or Church...
1928. The Mother is an unusual book, both in its story and its setting in a remote Sardinian hill village, half civilized and superstitious. But the c...
With an Introduction by D.H. Lawrence. (Awarded the Nobel Prize 1928). An unusual book, both in its story and its setting in a remote Sardinian hill village, half civilised and superstitious. The action of the story takes place so rapidly and the actual drama is so interwoven with the mental conflict, and all so forced by circumstances, that it is almost Greek in its simple and inevitable tragedy
With an Introduction by D.H. Lawrence. (Awarded the Nobel Prize 1928). An unusual book, both in its story and its setting in a remote Sardinian hill v...
With an Introduction by D.H. Lawrence. (Awarded the Nobel Prize 1928). An unusual book, both in its story and its setting in a remote Sardinian hill village, half civilised and superstitious. The action of the story takes place so rapidly and the actual drama is so interwoven with the mental conflict, and all so forced by circumstances, that it is almost Greek in its simple and inevitable tragedy.
With an Introduction by D.H. Lawrence. (Awarded the Nobel Prize 1928). An unusual book, both in its story and its setting in a remote Sardinian hill v...
"Cosima" tells the story of an aspiring writer growing up in Nuoro, Sardinia during the last decades of the nineteenth century when formal education for women was rare and literary careers unheard-of. Based on Deleddas own life, the work describes a young womans struggle against the dismay and disapproval of her family and friends at her creative ambitions. Yet it also reads like a charming fable with details of family life, rural traditions and wild bandits, and it is as much a novel of memory as of character or action.
Deleddas characters are poor country folk driven by some predetermined...
"Cosima" tells the story of an aspiring writer growing up in Nuoro, Sardinia during the last decades of the nineteenth century when formal education f...
"New Italian Women" is a collection of twenty-four stories by seventeen contemporary Italian women celebrates a high level of accomplishment that draws on a tradition of womens literature in Italy, but also marks a new and exciting vitality in Italian fiction.
Writing of various experiences and from different regions, these women all create with an ease born of confidence in their art. They exhibit a control, an emotional detachment, that allows the deep irony of their invented world to play below the surface. They have a succinctness, a skill in limiting, that reveals more than layers of...
"New Italian Women" is a collection of twenty-four stories by seventeen contemporary Italian women celebrates a high level of accomplishment that draw...
