MORE PRAISE

“Forbidden Notebook is a sly indictment of marriage and generational conflict, as relevant today as it was in postwar Italy.”

—MICHAEL MAGRAS, Shelf Awareness (starred Review)

“A fearlessly probing and candid look at marital dynamics and generational divisions, first published in Italy in 1952 . . . Goldstein’s translation invigorates a remarkable story, one that remains intensely relevant across time, cultures, and continents.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“De Céspedes deftly charts the widening gap between Valeria’s increasingly desperate inner life and the roles she feels forced to play in a feminist novel that consistently calls into question the ways its narrator makes sense of her claustrophobic domestic world. A wrenching, sardonic depiction of a woman caught in a social trap.”

—Kirkus (starred review)

Over the course of six months [there] are reflections on motherhood and femininity in postwar Rome that were as urgent and revelatory in the 1950s, when the novel was originally published, as they are today in post-Roe America.

—JENNY WU, The Millions

“There’s a long tradition of fiction wrestling with mid-twentieth-century middleclass anomie, and it’s in this context that Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook can be neatly situated. But there’s also something about this book that feels furtive, including the title and the conceit behind it—i.e., that this is the record of a frustrated woman who’s been writing her thoughts in secret. It’s the kind of lively narrative in which part of the writer’s compositional skill is creating that sense of unpredictability, and the novel is all the stronger for it.”

TOBIAS CARROLL, Words Without Borders

“A lost feminist classic to rival Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.”

—LUCY SCHOLES, Prospect

“Reading Alba de Cespedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe: social class, feelings, atmosphere.”

—ANNIE ERNAUX, Nobel Prize laureate and author of The Years