Written in the years immediately following the Second World War, Adam, One Afternoon gathers thirteen early stories by Italo Calvino. 

Originally published in Italian as part of Ultimo viene il corvo (1949), the stories emerge from the landscapes and social tensions of northern Italy, moving between rural childhood, class distinctions, wartime occupation and the partisan Resistance. Here, Calvino's imagination is already distinctly his own, although more firmly rooted in the conventions of neorealism. 

In A Goatherd at Luncheon, a young narrator becomes acutely conscious of the class assumptions embedded in his family's treatment of a visiting boy, while stories such as Hunger at Bévera register the practical absurdities and uneasy solidarities of wartime survival. Across the collection, Calvino's precise, deceptively straightforward prose attends to the small humiliations, accidents and contradictions through which larger historical forces become visible. An interesting glimpse of a writer developing the relationship between political reality and imaginative possibility that would remain central to his work.

Vintage, London, 2000. Vintage Calvino paperback edition, tenth printing. Originally published in Great Britain by Collins in 1957. Softcover with illustrated green typographic covers. Good condition, with light rubbing and shelf wear to covers and minor wear to edges.