Her Side of the Story Alba de Céspedes

TRANSLATED

BY

JILL FOULSTON

FICTION

HARDCOVER

ISBN: 9781662601439

PUB DATE: October 10, 2023

500pp

Price: $27 US / $36 CAN

“De Céspedes’ work has lost none of its subversive force.”

With an afterword by Elena Ferrante

From the author of Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes, a richly told novel she called “the story of a great love and of a crime.”

As she looks back on her life, Alessandra Corteggiani recalls her youth during the rise of fascism in Italy, the resistance, and the fall of Mussolini, the lives of the women in her family and her working-class neighborhood, rigorously committed to telling “her side of the story.”

Alessandra witnesses her mother, an aspiring concert pianist, suffer from the inability to escape her oppressive marriage. Later, she is sent away to live with her father’s relatives in the country, in the hope she’ll finally learn to submit herself to the patriarchal system and authority. But at the farm, Alessandra grows increasingly rebellious, conscious of the unjust treatment of generations of hardworking women in her family. When she refuses the marriage proposal from a neighboring farmer, she is sent back to Rome to tend to her ailing father.

In Rome, Alessandra meets Francesco, a charismatic anti-fascist professor, who ostensibly admires and supports her sense of independence and justice. But she soon comes to recognize that even as she respects Francesco and is keen to participate in his struggle to reclaim their country from fascism, this respect is unrequited, and that her own beloved husband is ensnared by patriarchal conventions when it comes to their relationship.

In these pages, De Céspedes delivers a breathtakingly accurate and timeless portrayal of the complexity of the female condition against the dramatic backdrop of WWII and the partisan uprising in Italy

PRAISE FOR Forbidden Notebook

“A brilliant, quietly tumultuous book and a welcome revival of an author too little known in the anglophone world.” —Toby Lichtig, The Wall Street Journal

ALBA DE CÉSPEDES (1911 – 1997) was a bestselling Cuban-Italian feminist writer greatly influenced by the cultural developments that lead to and resulted from World War II. In 1935 and again in 1943, she was jailed for her anti-fascist activities in Italy. After the war, she moved to Paris, where she lived until her death in 1997.

“Astounding . . . Forbidden Notebook does not feel 71 years old. Its prose is fresh and lively, and the issues it raises more contemporary than many would hope.”

—Lily Meyer, NPR