{"title":"Author of the Month: Alba de Céspedes","description":"\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003eAlba de Céspedes was one of Italy's most widely read novelists until Mussolini personally ordered her work suppressed. Elena Ferrante keeps her books by her bed and shares her English translator. These three novels — written across the 1930s, 40s, and 50s — form a single devastating argument about what it costs a woman to honestly examine her own life.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"theres-no-turning-back","title":"There's No Turning Back","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTranslated from Italian by Ann Goldstein\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRome, 1934. Eight young women are living together in a convent boarding house called the Grimaldi — studying, hiding, falling in love, nursing secrets, waiting to find out who they'll be. The nuns provide a fragile boundary between them and a city that is visibly reorganising itself around Mussolini. By the end of the book, that boundary (and much else) will be gone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDe Céspedes's debut novel was published in 1938 and went through twenty editions before the fascist government banned it. That they took so long is remarkable: this is a book that looks, with clear eyes, at what it costs to be a woman in a world run by men and offers no comfortable resolutions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe translation has its own story. Ann Goldstein worked from the 1966 revised edition, the text de Céspedes herself considered final — meaning this English version is not just a translation but the fullest form the novel ever took. One of the more quietly significant publishing events of 2025.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Unfaithful Bookshop ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57054986699135,"sku":null,"price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0986\/5763\/2639\/files\/getimage-32-scaled.jpg?v=1772473216"},{"product_id":"forbidden-notebook","title":"Forbidden Notebook","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTranslated from Italian by Ann Goldstein\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRome, 1952. On a Sunday afternoon, Valeria Cossati buys a notebook from a tobacconist's shop — an act that is technically illegal on the Sabbath, and which she immediately knows she must hide. What she hides inside it is more dangerous still: the truth about her own life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat follows is one of the great novels of domestic dissatisfaction — a middle-aged wife and mother slowly, irreversibly, becoming conscious of herself. The notebook is the problem. Writing things down makes them real. And real things, once seen, cannot be unseen.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDe Céspedes was a Cuban-Italian writer, resistance radio broadcaster, anti-fascist prisoner, and one of the essential voices of twentieth-century Italian literature — somehow overlooked in English until very recently. Forbidden Notebook arrived in Ann Goldstein's translation in 2023 and promptly recalibrated a lot of readers' understanding of what Italian women's fiction is. Goldstein, Elena Ferrante's translator, recognised the connection herself: de Céspedes is arguably the writer Ferrante was writing out of.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShort, compressed, and devastating.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Unfaithful Bookshop ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57054986731903,"sku":null,"price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0986\/5763\/2639\/files\/getimage-332.jpg?v=1772473128"},{"product_id":"her-side-of-the-story","title":"Her Side of the Story","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTranslated from Italian by Jill Foulston - Afterword by Elena Ferrante\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDe Céspedes described this novel as \"the story of a great love and of a crime.\" She wasn't being metaphorical.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlessandra Corteggiani looks back over her whole life — a childhood in a working-class Roman neighbourhood, a mother who was a gifted pianist and a trapped wife, the rise of fascism, the partisan resistance, a husband who believed in women's liberation right up until the point where it might have applied to her. The retrospective structure is everything: Alessandra is trying to understand something that took decades to become legible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe translation history is part of the book's story. An English edition appeared in 1952 under the title Best of Husbands — heavily abridged, substantially altered. Jill Foulston's 2023 translation restores the novel in full for the first time: longer, stranger, and considerably more unsparing. Elena Ferrante, who wrote the afterword, has been forthcoming about de Céspedes's influence on her own work. You can see it clearly here.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Unfaithful Bookshop ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57054986764671,"sku":null,"price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0986\/5763\/2639\/files\/getimage-245.jpg?v=1772473087"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0986\/5763\/2639\/collections\/cespedes-1.webp?v=1772729497","url":"https:\/\/unfaithfulbookshop.co.uk\/collections\/author-of-the-month-alba-de-cespedes.oembed","provider":"The Unfaithful Bookshop ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}