The Road to the City follows Delia, a young woman in a poor Italian village who longs for the city.

She is bored by domestic life, impatient with poverty, and drawn toward the promise of movement, attention, clothes, desire, and some undefined version of adulthood that seems to exist just beyond the fields. Around her are the usual Ginzburg buzzings: family obligation, class limitation, awkward courtship, marriage as practical arrangement, and the ugly little gap between wanting a life and knowing how to choose one.

This was Ginzburg’s first novel, originally published under a pseudonym during the war, and it already has the dry force of her later work. It is short, sharp, and emotionally unsentimental: a coming-of-age story with all the romance scraped off. The drama sits in Delia’s ordinary decisions, in the way escape can become another form of enclosure, and in how a young woman’s hunger for elsewhere can be quietly rerouted into the old machinery of marriage, compromise and regret. 

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