A magnificently stark book—within the smallness of one poor, muddled, provincial life, Natalia Ginzburg finds enormous pain and loss

An almost unbearably intimate novella,
The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too—she is a mass of confusion. She’s in a bleak space, lit with the hard clarity of a Pasolini film. Her family is no help: her father is largely absent; her mother is miserable; her sister’s unhappily promiscuous; her brothers are in a separate masculine world. Only her cousin Nini seems to see her. She falls into disgrace and then “marries up, ” but without any joy, blind to what was beautiful right before her own eyes.
The Road to the City was Ginzburg’s very first work, originally published under a pseudonym. “I think it might be her best book, ” her translator Gini Alhadeff remarked: “And apparently she thought so, too, at the end of her life, when assembling a complete anthology of her work for Mondadori.

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Gini Alhadeff won the 2018 Florio Prize for her translation of Fleur Jaeggy’s I am the Brother of XX.