An Italian master''s magnum opus about three generations of women and their unhappy marriages, now in the first-gever unabridged English translation.
Elsa Morante is one of the great writers of the twentieth century—Natalia Ginzburg said she was the writer of her own generation that she admired most—and yet her work remains little known in the United States. Morante''s celebrated first novel, Lies and Sorcery, written during the war, when Morante, half-Jewish, was living in hiding, and published in 1948, is a sprawling 800-page novel in the grand tradition of Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Proust, spanning the lives of three generations of wildly eccentric women. Set in Sicily, the story is told by Elisa, who, after the sudden death of her parents, was adopted at a young age by a wealthy “fallen woman.” Over the fifteen years that she has lived with her “protectress,” Elisa has retreated into an imaginary world populated by relatives and
