“Cause for celebration.”—Jhumpa Lahiri
A novel of secrets and female solidarity set in post-war Milan, by one of Italy’s most significant women writers.
In A Very Cold Winter, it is 1946 and Milan is in ruins. A woman named 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 incubate 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. As the narrative roams from the thoughts of character to character, the residents of this “hotel for the poor” consider their own complicity and moral compromises, wondering if they’re able to escape the weight of what they’ve lived through.
Fausta Cialente’s exquisite prose captures the frailty of the human heart in its desperate search for connection. An introduction from author and Italian translator Claudia Durastanti frames this classic feminist icon for the modern American listener. 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.
Fausta Cialente (1898–1994) was one of the first self-declared feminist Italian writers. Her early work anticipated modern feminism by decades, however, distribution was limited by the Fascist censorship that followed her refusal to cut depictions of a lesbian affair from her first book Natalia. Cialente returned home after the war, and after a long silence, she began publishing again in 1961, eventually winning the prestigious Strega Prize in 1976. Cialente spent the last period of her life in Pangbourne, England, working mainly on translations into Italian from English, and she remained there until her death at the age of ninety-six.View all by Fausta Cialente
