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A Novel
by Alba De Céspedes
Discover the astonishingly powerful debut novel by the beloved feminist author of the "brilliant" (The Wall Street Journal) Forbidden Notebook and the "courageous" (The Washington Post) Her Side of the Story that was so subversive, it was banned by the Italian Fascist regime when it was first published in 1938.
A coming-of-age novel that is as relevant today as it was nearly ninety years ago, There's No Turning Back centers on eight women with radically different backgrounds who attend the same college in Rome. Some are there to study, others to escape a scandal, or keep a secret, and during their time there, they experience the challenges of love, work, and emancipation.
Considered experimental and revolutionary at the time, this novel established Alba de Céspedes as a powerful new voice in the 20th century. Translated by Ann Goldstein, There's No Turning Back demonstrates why de Céspedes deserves "an important place in the canon of women's literature" (Chicago Review of Books).
"The author builds tension as the characters consider the gravity of their choices. As Sylvia, the 'genius' member of their group, notes, 'It's as if we're on a bridge. We've already departed from one side and haven't yet reached the other...What awaits us is still enveloped in fog. We don't know what we'll find when the fog clears.' Readers will be grateful for this rediscovery." —Publishers Weekly (starred 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." —The Washington Post
"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." —The Guardian (UK)
This information about There's No Turning Back was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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