A novel that aims to capture the mood and atmosphere of Italy (and in particular Ferrara) in the last summers of the thirties, focusing on an aristocratic Jewish family moving towards its doom.

Into the insular town of 1930s Ferrara, a new doctor arrives. Fadigati is hopeful and modern, and more than anything wants to fit into his new home. But his fresh, appealing appearance soon crumbles when the townsfolk discover his homosexuality, and the young man he pays to be his lover humiliates him publicly.

A new translation of Giorgio Bassani's haunting collection of short stories that evoke 1930s Ferrara, with an introduction by Ali Smith. Isolated lives and a lost world are evoked in these memorable stories set in the Jewish-Italian community of 1930s Ferrara. A young man's unrequited love; a strange disappearance; a faded hotel; a lonely funfair; the smell of mown hay at the gates of the Jewish Cemetery - these vivid, impressionistic snapshots build a picture of life's brevity and intensity. Part of the sequence including The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and...

A new translation of Giorgio Bassani's award winning collection of novellas, which inspired his masterpiece The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. A young working class woman abandoned by her bourgeois lover; the tensions of intermarriage between established classes and communities; a holocaust survivor seemingly back from the dead; a formidable socialist activist defying house arrest; the only surviving witness to the first local atrocity of the Second World War. In these five unforgettable stories, Bassani gave life to the characters that would inform the Romanzo di Ferrara, his suite of novels...

'Exquisite. . . a classic tour de force' The New York Times 'It struggled to keep itself aloft, to gain height. But then it suddenly gave up, and dropped as though it were breaking into many pieces' Early on a cold Sunday morning, forty-five-year-old Edgardo Limentani gets up to join a shooting party in the countryside surrounding the town of Ferrara. As the day passes, he contemplates his past, his disappointments and how he has got here. Like the birds he shoots, he realizes, he is trapped, broken, waiting alone for the final coup de grace. Then he sees a way out. The fifth book...