Winner of the Bagutta Prize, The Manzoni Family set in ducal Italy and post-revolutionary France, captures the story of Alessandro Manzoni—celebrated Milanese nobleman, man of letters, and author of the masterpiece of nineteenth-century Italian literature, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed)—and the women of his life. The dynastic tale begins with the matriarchal figure of Giulia, the mother whom the young Alessandro Manzoni found in Paris after she had abandoned him as an infant. Following her, there is Enrichetta, the woman he and his mother chose to be his wife, and the many children she had by him until her death; literary friends from the beau monde in Italy and Paris; and Alessandro's second wife, Teresa, and her children. Against the background of Napoleonic occupation, the reestablishment of Austrian hegemony, and the stirrings of the revolutionary urge for unification and independence, Ginzburg gracefully weaves the story of the Manzoni dynasty, a family that seems to grow autonomously around the life of the writer, effortlessly incorporating the epic tumult and emotion of the age. Ginzburg explores this fascinating true story and celebrated author with the elegance that has assured her rightful place among history’s acclaimed literary titans.

Italy’s greatest novel and a masterpiece of world literature, The Betrothed chronicles the unforgettable romance of Renzo and Lucia, who endure tyranny, war, famine, and plague to be together. Published in 1827 but set two centuries earlier, against the tumultuous backdrop of seventeenth-century Lombardy during the Thirty Years’ War, The Betrothed is the story of two peasant lovers who want nothing more than to marry. Their region of northern Italy is under Spanish occupation, and when the vicious Spaniard Don Rodrigo blocks their union in an attempt to take Lucia for himself, the couple must struggle to persevere against his plots—which include false charges against Renzo and the kidnapping of Lucia by a robber baron called the Unnamed—while beset by the hazards of war, bread riots, and a terrifying outbreak of bubonic plague. First and foremost a love story, the novel also weaves issues of faith, justice, power, and truth into a sweeping epic in the tradition of Ivanhoe, Les Misérables, and War and Peace. Groundbreakingly populist in its day and hugely influential to succeeding generations, Alessandro Manzoni’s masterwork has long been considered one of Italy’s national treasures. Translated by Archibald Colquhoun

In September to be released as the film THE FAMILY, starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Tommy Lee Jones. Directed by Luc Besson, produced by Martin Scorsese. Fred Blake has moved to Normandy with his dysfunctional family, ostensibly to write a history of the Allied landings.. But Fred’s real name is Giovanni Manzoni - an ex-Mafia boss who has snitched. And his record in other locations under the FBI Witness Protection Program would indicate that his cover is not likely to last very long.

A masterpiece of European literature that blends family memoir and fiction An Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, doubtful, comical, indispensable, comes to life in the pages of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking—when he isn’t provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini’s Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives. Family Lexicon is about a family and language—and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel, yet everything is true. “Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy [it],” Ginzburg tells us at the start. “The places, events, and people are all real.”

No Way is a very short novel, bare and bleak as bones. Its ominous English title is appropriate enough for its mood, except for the easy current slanginess of that phrase, mouthed by so many of us now on trivial occasions.

The story of a family is told through the history of a house. This novel unfolds through letters, the life of the family parallels the fate of the house. As it is sold, the family fragments, and although each protagonist tries to recover happiness, they are each now on their own.

"Ginzburg's marriage to Leone Ginzburg, who met his death at the hands of the Nazis for his anti-fascist activities, and her work for the Einaudi publishing house placed her squarely in the center of Italian political and cultural life. But whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside where her family was interned during World War II, or contemporary Rome, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history - even if she approached them only indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life."--Jacket.