Description

A novel of secrets and female solidarity set in post-war Milan, by one of Italy’s most significant women writers. Translated by Julia Nelsen.

It is 1946 and Milan is in ruins. Camilla opens her illegally occupied attic to her extended family as they rebuild their lives among the rubble. The absence of men – lost to war, death, or abandonment – leaves the burden of survival to the women, who use the attic to begin to imagine fragile futures: Camilla works to carry the family toward dignity and normalcy; Lalla dreams of becoming a novelist to escape their grim reality; Regina, widowed by the war, pins her hopes on her infant daughter; Alba chases independence and love. Varying political ideologies, loyalties, and wartime secrets filter through the house, creating a thick net of tension.

Fausta Cialente’s exquisite prose captures the frailty of the human heart in its desperate search for connection. As the narrative roams from the thoughts of character to character, the residents of the attic consider their own complicity and moral compromises. Tender, thought-provoking, and devastatingly beautiful, A Very Cold Winter is about the impossibility of forgetting the past and the difficulty of living with it.

‘Cause for celebration’ Jhumpa Lahiri

‘A Very Cold Winter is Fausta Cialente’s interpretation of war, family, and of womanhood… What does it take to be time less but never outdated? This is the mystery and balance which Fausta Cialente’s novel treads. The Italian women writers that mean so much to us today – Ginzburg, de Cespedes, Lalla Romano, Fabri zia Ramondino – are not modern because we wish them to be. The reason why their work, so easily dis missed and neglected at that time, is startlingly current is because they were not afraid to imagine womanhood fully on the page, with all its consequences’ Claudia Durastanti

‘A Very Cold Winter contends with what it means to move on in the aftermath of war’ The New Yorker

‘An exquisite chronicle of frozen hearts and their gradual thaw’ Publishers Weekly

Publisher Review

'Cialente was a pioneering feminist, anti-fascist writer with a profound literary sensibility. In this crucial account of post-war Italy, her rootless authorial perspective sheds unique light on individual, collective, and national trauma, and speaks to ever-relevant questions about what it means to be a woman, a foreigner, and a survivor. Julia Nelsen's engrossing English translation is cause for celebration.' Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Namesake 'The first of the undersung Fausta Cialente's books to appear in English... A Very Cold Winter contends with what it means to move on in the aftermath of war.' The New Yorker 'Stellar... rich, enthralling historical fiction. World War II is a perennial venue for historical fiction, its immediate aftermath far less so. Which makes Cialente's A Very Cold Winter all the more welcome.' New York Times 'A Very Cold Winter is Fausta Cialente's interpretation of war, family, and of womanhood... What does it take to be time less but never outdated? This is the mystery and balance which Fausta Cialente's novel treads. The Italian women writers that mean so much to us today - Ginzburg, de Cespedes, Lalla Romano, Fabri zia Ramondino - are not modern because we wish them to be. The reason why their work, so easily dis missed and neglected at that time, is startlingly current is because they were not afraid to imagine womanhood fully on the page, with all its consequences' Claudia Durastanti 'In this overdue translation of Cialente's vital 1966 novel, a family struggles to find harmony while crammed together in a frigid Milan squat... The result is an exquisite chronicle of frozen hearts and their gradual thaw.' Publishers Weekly, starred review 'Uncertain and subtle, like life.' The Believer 'Entrancing... Rich with sensual observations and insights.' Foreword Reviews 'Cialente builds a layered pastiche of contrasts: Death and birth, sunny memories against gloomy present, simplicity next to sophistication, and always public versus private... [A] gem.' Kirkus Reviews '[A Very Cold Winter] offers a stark and uncompromising portrait of debasement in post-war Milan, a city scarred by misery, social erosion, and loss... Cialente contends that the labor of self-determination is the essential prerequisite for restoring a conscience that is at once personal and shared-the prelude to a collective awakening that, to this day, is yet to come.' Asymptote 'Cialente's style as rendered by Nelsen has a centrifugal quality... [she] valorizes everyday life as a site of struggle, too, a place just as world-historical and worthy of our attention as war or political history.' Full Stop