Within The Walls

A new translation of Giorgio Bassani's award winning collection of novellas, which inspired his masterpiece <i>The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.</i><br><br>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. <br><br>In these five unforgettable stories, Bassani gave life to the characters that would inform the <i>Romanzo di Ferrara, </i>his suite of novels depicting life in the city. Moving, poetic, atmospheric and artfully observed, this collection is a distillation of Bassani's genius. It won the Strega Prize on first publication as <i>Cinque Storie Ferraresi</i> in 1956, and established Bassani as one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century.<br><br>'Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists' <i>Guardian</i><br><br>'The most uncompromising, merciful and merciless writer' Ali Smith