Novel Of Ferrara

Given new life by poet and translator Jamie McKendrick, The Novel of Ferrara combines six classic novels into the epic masterwork that Giorgio Bassani intended them to be. Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after World War II, these interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters: the respected doctor whose homosexuality is tolerated until he is humiliated by scandal; a survivor of the Nazi death camps whose return to Ferrara gradually results in ostracism; a young man discovering the ugly, treacherous price that people will pay for a sense of belonging. The city itself assumes a character and voice, deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs. This seminal work seals Bassani's reputation as "a quietly insistent chronicler of our age's various menaces to liberty" (Guardian).