The Novel of Ferrara - Hardcover

“By connecting with Bassani's souls, and sometimes by even becoming one (or all) of them, McKendrick brings to life--anew--the miracle of translation.”
- John Florio Prize for Italian Translation shortlist citation

“Sitting beside the author watching a fire blaze--destructive, beautiful, and above all compelling--is largely how it feels reading Bassani's work.”
- Tim Parks, Harper's Magazine

“The book is stippled with shadow and light. Bassani pairs the sorrow of exclusion with the hope of joy and acceptance... The power of Bassani's writing is such that, for a moment, his transitory world seems beautifully everlasting.”
- Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“The long overdue first appearance in English of Georgio Bassano's Il romanzo di Ferrara in a single volume, as the great Italian Jewish writer always intended, was very welcome. Translated by Jamie McKendrick as The Novel of Ferrara, it consists of four novels and two collections of stories, all suffused with Bassani's melancholia and sly wit.”
- Peter Parker, Spectator

“The Novel of Ferrara can be compared to Joyce's Dubliner's or Balzac's La Comédie Humaine; but a more fitting parallel is the yizkor books that were  produced after the Holocaust to commemorate so many vanished Jewish towns.”
- Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine

“Bassani's history of the "little segregated universe" from which he was expelled is essential reading for anyone thirsting for an understanding of the complex density of Europe's multicultural inheritance, or wondering whether the world we know might once again be falling for the temptations of fascism.”
- Fernanda Eberstadt, The New York Times Book Review

“Giorgio Bassani's The Novel of Ferrara, in its complete form, splendidly translated by Jamie McKendrick, is a book of immense pathos, eloquence, elegiac splendor, and a requiem for so much of Italian Jewry.”
- Harold Bloom

“A sturdy friend to cherish for decades, Giorgio Bassani's The Novel of Ferrara collects the six books the Italian maestro wrote about his home city and its Jewish community during and after the Fascist era into a single, elegant volume. In gorgeous translations by the poet Jamie McKendrick, this edition lets us see the best-known episode--The Garden of the Finzi-Continis--in its broadest, indeed epic, context.”
- Boyd Tonkin, theartsdesk.com

“The best fiction writer of postwar Italy... The Novel of Ferrara has a sensuous and subtle economy, a fulness of dramatic life and depth of art that none of the other three [Calvino, Pasolini, Sciascia] comes near... He wrote about exclusion, desire, betrayal, memory.”
- Peter Robb, Midnight in Sicily

“The fiction of this most dispassionate, most merciless and clear-eyed chronicler of the sequences and consequences of history--in stories almost always about the city's decisions about whom to include or exclude as its own--is, in the end, against all the odds, a declaration of love.”
- Ali Smith, The Guardian