If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

Ingenious * Mail on Sunday *Breathtakingly inventiveThe greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century * Guardian *Reading Calvino, you’re constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you’ve never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you’re usually too busy laughing to go mad… I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world endsA devastating, wonderfully ingenious parody of all those dreary best-sellers you buy at the airport… It is a “world novel”: take it with you next time you plan to travel in an armchair * Observer *A brilliant work of the imagination and the intellect working in union. And, by the way, it’s very funny also * Scotsman *

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. One of the most respected writers of the twentieth century, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1973 he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. He died in 1985. A collection of Calvino’s posthumous personal writings, The Hermit in Paris, was published in 2003.