Description
Description
From the beloved author of Forbidden Notebook and Her Side of the Story comes a coming-of-age novel so subversive, it was banned by the Fascist regime when it was first published in 1938. There's No Turning Back was Alba de Céspedes's debut novel, first published to great acclaim and commercial success in 1938. The narrative centers on eight women in their early twenties who attend the same college in Rome. Some are there to study, others to escape a scandal or keep a secret. Over the course of two years, from 1934 to 1936, Vinca, Valentina, Augusta, Silvia, Xenia, Anna, Milly, and Emanuela--who stem from radically different backgrounds--enter adulthood, experiencing the challenges of love, work, and emancipation. Ultimately, each young woman takes a completely different direction based on her own expectations, ambitions, and choices. Much like Virginia Woolf's The Waves, each character is given a distinct voice, with the narrative shifting seamlessly from one point of view to the next. Considered experimental and revolutionary at the time, this novel entered the canon as the first to break with the traditional image of womanhood expected in literature and society--so much so that the Fascist regime banned the novel in Italy. As the novel that established Alba de Céspedes as a subversive new voice and in a modern translation by Elena Ferrante translator Ann Goldstein, this novel is bound to build on the success of Forbidden Notebook and Her Side of the Story.
About the Author
About the Author
Alba de Céspedes (1911-1997) was a bestselling Italian Cuban feminist writer greatly influenced by the cultural developments that lead to and resulted from World War II. Along with being imprisoned for her anti-fascist work, several of her novels were banned in Italy. After the war, she moved to Paris, where she lived until her death in 1997.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"De Céspedes writes with blazing urgency about the hidden lives of women realizing that they are being suffocated by the very institutions that claim to protect them. A book so incendiary it's practically hot to the touch."
--Sarah Chihaya, author of Bibliophobia "One of Italy's most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked writers."
--Jhumpa Lahiri "Reading Alba de Céspedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe: social class, feelings, atmosphere."
--Annie Ernaux "De Céspedes' work has lost none of its subversive force."
--Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review "Alba de Céspedes wrote novels in the 1940s and 1950s that were radically contemporary, both then and now . . . [her] fiction is written with an acute sense of responsibility to tell the truth."
--Elena Lappin, The Washington Post "If you're a Ferrante fan, you'll likely love de Céspedes' piercing prose, as it probes the inner lives of women searching for meaning in a patriarchal Italian culture and facing the distance between who they've become and who they'd like to be."
--Julianne McShane, Mother Jones "De Céspedes combines intimate revelation about women's bodily and emotional lives with a deep moral seriousness about the need for change within marriage as an institution and within women's lives."
--Lara Feigel, The Guardian "De Céspedes' account of the alienating, confining, tenacious force of the family endures."
--Eleanor Careless, The New Inquiry "The Italian Fascist government once banned [There's No Turning Back] because of its feminist themes, but it lives on with Ann Goldstein's translation.
--S.T.L., A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Winter "Boundary-breaking...If you're looking to rediscover historically significant (but often ignored) female authors this year, There's No Turning Back is a great place to start."
--A LitHub "Most Anticipated Book of 2025" "Goldstein is an indomitable translator. Without her, how would you read Ferrante? Here, she takes her pen to a work by the great Cuban-Italian writer de Céspedes, banned in the fascist Italy of the 1930s, that follows a group of female literature students living together in a Roman boarding house."
--The Millions' Most Anticipated books of Winter 2025 "Readers looking for tips on how to annoy a fascist government will savor Alba de Céspedes's magnificently incendiary novel, first published in Italy in 1938, during Mussolini's reign... This feminist manifesto about 'eight young women living in a convent-boarding house in Rome, ' infuriated authorities so much that the government blocked further publication, albeit after 20 printings. This translation, based on de Céspedes's 1966 final revision, shows contemporary audiences what all the fuss was about. 'To free herself from the tyranny of the man, the woman has to take his place, ' Augusta warns. Mussolini must have loved that line. Enlightened modern readers genuinely will, however, along with the rest of this forward-thinking novel."
--Michael Magras, Shelf Awareness [starred review] "Magnificently savage. Translated into English for the first time by Ann Goldstein, with characteristic muscle. . . . The radical pleasure of de Céspedes [is] watching her stalk the pages of this novel, like the iron-hearted Sister Prudenzia, and extinguish all the moralizing. There is a sure-fire way out of purgatory, she shows us, and it is not good behavior... To read de Céspedes for the first time brings both exhilaration and humility, a reordering of one's mental bookshelves. There's No Turning Back was written decades before Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963) or Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) - two equally transgressive tales of febrile academic friendship. And the tectonic violence that erupts in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet was rumbling underneath the Grimaldi well over half a century earlier. That Ferrante and Alba de Céspedes share a translator makes that literary connection feel direct, but the deep pleasure here is the opportunity - the invitation - to trace it through decades of Italian neorealism: to turn back."
--Beejay Silcox, Times Literary Supplement "With its imperfect, passionate characters, and its passages of intense analysis of their relationships and their inner lives, Céspedes's novel will appeal to fans of Ferrante and Natalia Ginzburg. Reading the book in times nearly as chaotic as those in which it was published delivers a kind of subversive pleasure."
--The Washington Post "THE GROUP by Mary McCarthy meets RED BOOK OF FAREWELLS by Pirkko Saisio. Phenomenal novel about college aged women in the fascist 1930s of Rome. Translated by the reliably brilliant Ann Goldstein from the Italian."
--Charlie Jones, A Room of One's Own Bookstore
--Sarah Chihaya, author of Bibliophobia "One of Italy's most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked writers."
--Jhumpa Lahiri "Reading Alba de Céspedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe: social class, feelings, atmosphere."
--Annie Ernaux "De Céspedes' work has lost none of its subversive force."
--Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review "Alba de Céspedes wrote novels in the 1940s and 1950s that were radically contemporary, both then and now . . . [her] fiction is written with an acute sense of responsibility to tell the truth."
--Elena Lappin, The Washington Post "If you're a Ferrante fan, you'll likely love de Céspedes' piercing prose, as it probes the inner lives of women searching for meaning in a patriarchal Italian culture and facing the distance between who they've become and who they'd like to be."
--Julianne McShane, Mother Jones "De Céspedes combines intimate revelation about women's bodily and emotional lives with a deep moral seriousness about the need for change within marriage as an institution and within women's lives."
--Lara Feigel, The Guardian "De Céspedes' account of the alienating, confining, tenacious force of the family endures."
--Eleanor Careless, The New Inquiry "The Italian Fascist government once banned [There's No Turning Back] because of its feminist themes, but it lives on with Ann Goldstein's translation.
--S.T.L., A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Winter "Boundary-breaking...If you're looking to rediscover historically significant (but often ignored) female authors this year, There's No Turning Back is a great place to start."
--A LitHub "Most Anticipated Book of 2025" "Goldstein is an indomitable translator. Without her, how would you read Ferrante? Here, she takes her pen to a work by the great Cuban-Italian writer de Céspedes, banned in the fascist Italy of the 1930s, that follows a group of female literature students living together in a Roman boarding house."
--The Millions' Most Anticipated books of Winter 2025 "Readers looking for tips on how to annoy a fascist government will savor Alba de Céspedes's magnificently incendiary novel, first published in Italy in 1938, during Mussolini's reign... This feminist manifesto about 'eight young women living in a convent-boarding house in Rome, ' infuriated authorities so much that the government blocked further publication, albeit after 20 printings. This translation, based on de Céspedes's 1966 final revision, shows contemporary audiences what all the fuss was about. 'To free herself from the tyranny of the man, the woman has to take his place, ' Augusta warns. Mussolini must have loved that line. Enlightened modern readers genuinely will, however, along with the rest of this forward-thinking novel."
--Michael Magras, Shelf Awareness [starred review] "Magnificently savage. Translated into English for the first time by Ann Goldstein, with characteristic muscle. . . . The radical pleasure of de Céspedes [is] watching her stalk the pages of this novel, like the iron-hearted Sister Prudenzia, and extinguish all the moralizing. There is a sure-fire way out of purgatory, she shows us, and it is not good behavior... To read de Céspedes for the first time brings both exhilaration and humility, a reordering of one's mental bookshelves. There's No Turning Back was written decades before Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963) or Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) - two equally transgressive tales of febrile academic friendship. And the tectonic violence that erupts in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet was rumbling underneath the Grimaldi well over half a century earlier. That Ferrante and Alba de Céspedes share a translator makes that literary connection feel direct, but the deep pleasure here is the opportunity - the invitation - to trace it through decades of Italian neorealism: to turn back."
--Beejay Silcox, Times Literary Supplement "With its imperfect, passionate characters, and its passages of intense analysis of their relationships and their inner lives, Céspedes's novel will appeal to fans of Ferrante and Natalia Ginzburg. Reading the book in times nearly as chaotic as those in which it was published delivers a kind of subversive pleasure."
--The Washington Post "THE GROUP by Mary McCarthy meets RED BOOK OF FAREWELLS by Pirkko Saisio. Phenomenal novel about college aged women in the fascist 1930s of Rome. Translated by the reliably brilliant Ann Goldstein from the Italian."
--Charlie Jones, A Room of One's Own Bookstore
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Washington Square Press
Pub date:
2025-02-11
Length:
304 pages
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