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There’s No Turning Back

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What to expect

The young women studying at the Grimaldi yearn for new kinds of life. Monitored by the nuns who run the college, eight of them form a close group, sharing confidences and hopes for the future. But each, too, has her private secrets - a child from an early love affair, frustrated artistic ambitions, burning desires and petty jealousies. With the passing months, their paths begin to diverge, as each woman struggles towards her own idea of freedom.
A virtuosic group portrait,  There's No Turning Back broke radical new ground in representing modern women's lives when it first appeared in 1938, facing immediate censorship by the Fascist authorities. Published in a new translation by the acclaimed Ann Goldstein, it is a powerfully moving story of women coming of age in a turbulent world.

Critics Review

Reading Alba de Cu00e9spedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe: social class, feelings, atmosphere
Annie Ernaux
One of Italy's most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked writers
Jhumpa Lahiri
n

Matches the bravery of the author'su00a0n Forbidden Notebook in its groundbreaking portrayal of a group of female friends in Rome... Readers will be grateful for this rediscovery

n
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
De Cu00e9spedes writes with blazing urgency about the hidden lives of women realizing that they are being suffocated by the very institutions that claim to protect them. A book so incendiary it's practically hot to the touch
Sarah Chihaya, author of 'Bibliophilia'
Author Alba Cespedes
Narrator Aida Reluzco
Duration 11 hours and 1 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781805334866
Format Audiobook
Publisher Pushkin Press
Genre Classic fiction, Fiction in translation
Availability AU, GB, IE

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