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Alba de Céspedes (1911-97) was a bestselling Italian-Cuban novelist, poet and screenwriter. The granddaughter of the first President of Cuba, de Céspedes was raised in Rome. Married at 15 and a mother by 16, she began her writing career after her divorce at the age of 20. She worked as a journalist throughout the 1930s while also taking an active part in the Italian partisan struggle, and was twice jailed for her anti-fascist activities. After the fall of fascism, she founded the literary journal Mercurio and went on to become one of Italy's most successful and most widely translated authors. Her Side of the Story is also forthcoming from Pushkin Press.Electric... de Céspedes's novel anticipates the candid confessionals of writers such as Deborah Levy, Sheila Heti and Rachel Cusk... Formally precise, psychologically rich, and suffused in suspicion and suspense, Forbidden Notebook is an exquisite, tormented howl
- Lucy Scholes, Financial Times
I don't think I've read a finer unpicking of a complex mother-daughter relationship... A damning portrait emerges of the prisons on which modern family life is built. It is devastatingly effective, a tour de force
Sunday Times
Reading Alba de Céspedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe: social class, feelings atmosphere
- Annie Ernaux,
Incendiary: a bomb beneath the bed that has been made for her. Turning its pages, the feeling grows that all women, metaphorically speaking, keep a little black book just as Valeria does
- Rachel Cooke, Observer
Still speaks to women's lives today... For the reader, the discoveries of the notebook emerge as discoveries of freedom. We share Valeria's pleasure and release when she manages secretly to write
- Lara Feigel, Guardian
Feels strikingly contemporary... a newly rediscovered classic of Italian literature that draws an arc between the domestic and political, and between women of decades past and now
New Statesman
One of Italy's most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked writers
- Jhumpa Lahiri,
While I'm writing, I confine myself to occasionally reading books that keep me company not as entertainment but as solid companions. I call them books of encouragement, like those by Alba de Céspedes
- Elena Ferrante,
[Valeria] soon makes an enraptured confidante of the reader... The writing sparkles with candour and self-awareness
Irish Times
The voice seizes our attention at once: forceful, clear and morally engaged... recalls Natalia Ginzburg and Elena Ferrante... Her story is one from which no one may look away, told in words that stay ringing in the mind
Washington Post
Rarely has uncovering someone's innermost thoughts and desires felt as powerful as in Alba de Céspedes' 1952 novel, Forbidden Notebook
BBC Culture
A lost feminist classic to rival Penelope Mortimer's The Pumpkin Eater and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique
- Lucy Scholes, Prospect
Recently rediscovered, her work has lost none of its subversive force... What might have been a family story becomes an excruciating study of the diarist herself
New York Times
Quick, propulsive, and addictive. Intimate, smart, and smoldering... capturing an almost mystical, transcendently luminous awareness
LA Review of Books
Intimate, quietly subversive
New Yorker
The absorbing and abidingly resonant confession of a woman's desire to do that most elusive thing: forge a self apart from her caring for others. Forbidden Notebook can also be read as an allegory of fascism, a post-Roe cautionary tale, and corroboration of the revelatory and exhilarating but also implosive power of honest words.
- Lisa Halliday, bestselling author of Asymmetry,
Valeria begins to keep a record of her observations and feelings, first haltingly, then with increasing urgency and insight... It is the very smallness of Forbidden Notebook's scope that makes it so powerful
New Yorker
Brilliantly and acutely observed
Literary Review
The insights Valeria gains as she writes are as intoxicating as they are painful, because they make her aware -- for the first time -- of the constraints of her own existence; rigidly delineated by morality, social anxiety and self-denial. A secret missive from a past that is not over yet. Ruthless, perceptive, suspenseful
- Judith Schalansky, author of 'An Inventory of Losses',
Astounding... Its prose is fresh and lively, and the issues it raises more contemporary than many would hope
NPR
How writing can become an outlet for freedom... how it can do so, without one even realizing it -- this is what Alba de Céspedes reveals, in clear, unobtrusive language, allowing readers to marvel, in the reverberations of her sentences, at how topical this book still is to this day
- Nino Haratischvili, author of 'The Eighth Life',
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)
A wrenching, sardonic depiction of a woman caught in a social trap
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)