A new translation of Giorgio Bassani's award winning collection of novellas, which inspired his masterpiece The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.A young working class woman abandoned by her bourgeois lover; the tensions of intermarriage between established classes and communities; a holocaust survivor seemingly back from the dead; a formidable socialist activist defying house arrest; the only surviving witness to the first local atrocity of the Second World War. In these five unforgettable stories, Bassani gave life to the characters that would inform the Romanzo di Ferrara, his suite of novels depicting life in the city. Moving, poetic, atmospheric and artfully observed, this collection is a distillation of Bassani's genius. It won the Strega Prize on first publication as Cinque Storie Ferraresi in 1956, and established Bassani as one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century.'Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists' Guardian'The most uncompromising, merciful and merciless writer' Ali Smith