The Dry Heart begins with a murder, then calmly walks backwards through the marriage that made it possible.

A woman shoots her husband between the eyes, goes out for coffee, and begins recounting the sequence of humiliations, loneliness, small hopes, evasions, silences and emotional bargains that led her there. There is no grand melodrama in the machinery of it. Ginzburg lets catastrophe arrive through domestic understatement: a room, a husband who withholds, a wife waiting for love to become explicit, a marriage curdling without ever becoming operatic enough to announce itself.

Set in postwar Italy, the novella is a study of emotional starvation. The narrator’s life with Alberto is built out of almost-love, failed recognition and social obligation. Ginzburg’s prose is famously plain, but not simple: she strips the sentence down until only the heartbeat remains. Very good for readers who like psychological fiction, domestic unease, clipped brutality, and women narrators whose calmness is much more disturbing than hysteria.

Daunt Books paperback, 2021 UK edition. Very good second-hand condition with only light handling and shelf wear.