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...

"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...