The Road to the City

Reviews

"The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original." — Rachel Cusk

"I’m utterly entranced by Ginzburg’s style—her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear. " — Maggie Nelson

"Her prose style is deceptively simple and very complex. Its effect on the reader is both calming and thrilling—that’s not so easy to do." — Deborah Levy

"A bleak and smarting read, a remarkable debut." — Naomi Huffman, New York Times

"Ginzburg’s view of family is so unsentimental, it’s visionary...The Road may be a small story about a small place, but Ginzburg’s clarity lends grandeur to Delia’s plight." — Diane Josefowicz, Necessary Fiction

"The youngest of five, Ginzburg writes like someone used to being interrupted, precisely observing daily life with a sibling’s affectionate revenge. Her work is marked by a kind of atmospheric pressure." — Jessi Jezewska Stevens, 4Columns

"Ginzburg has an incredible talent for depicting explosive clashes within families, integrating insight and humour into her narrative...this lemon of a book invites one to take a bite, to relish the burn." — Catherine Xinxin Yu, Asymptote Journal

"A blister of violence lurks tense beneath the words, the skin of it wearing thin, ready to be popped." — Rhian Sasseen, LitHub