A Silence Shared

Description

Forced back to her remote hometown by the war, Giulia is immediately drawn to a couple in a similar situation: graceful, spontaneous Ada and her husband Paolo, a sickly teacher and partisan in hiding. Joined from Turin by Giulia's husband Stefano, the two couples form an intense bond; as the Germans begin to occupy Italy, a subtle dance of attractions begins, intensified by their shared isolation and the muffled hum of threat over a long, hard winter.In prose of subtle, enigmatic atmospheres and acutely precise images, Lalla Romano evokes both the tension and the stillness of life in occupied Italy. Translated into English for the first time, A Silence Shared is a captivating classic novel that inhabits the silent spaces between historic events, depicting the mysterious luminosity of human relationships in extraordinary circumstances.

Graziella 'Lalla' Romano (1906-2001) was an Italian novelist, poet, translator and visual artist. Initially more interested in painting, from the 1940s Romano turned increasingly to writing, publishing her first poetry collection in 1941. During World War II she returned to her home province of Cuneo and became involved with the partisans. Her first novel, Maria, was published in 1953, and she went on to become one of Italy's most renowned writers, earning the Pavese Prize and the Strega Prize before her death at the age of 94.

'Successful to the point of perfection. There's not a word, not a sentence in the novel that doesn't add to the refined music-verging on silence-that's so characteristic of [Romano]' - Giorgio Bassani, author of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis 'Romano writes in a dreamlike present, which is to say the present that appears to us in dreams... clear and full of shadows, concrete and out of reach' - Natalia Ginzburg 'A subtle and captivating story, always right there... An incredibly complex and tough knot of human ties, [explored] with a heightened sensitivity that never falters' - Italo Calvino, author of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller 'I was struck straightaway by the singular force of her taut, meditative, sorrowful writing... I admired her concise sentences, brief chapters, and distilled language' - Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake 'A marvel. All silence and noticing, glimpses and wonder. I've not read anything quite like it before' - Sunjeev Sahota, Booker Prize-longlisted author of China Room