A Very Cold Winter

A novel of secrets and female solidarity set in post-war Milan, by one of Italy’s most significant women writers. Translated by Julia Nelsen.

It is 1946 and Milan is in ruins. Camilla opens her illegally occupied attic to her extended family as they rebuild their lives among the rubble. The absence of men – lost to war, death, or abandonment – leaves the burden of survival to the women, who use the attic to begin to imagine fragile futures: Camilla works to carry the family toward dignity and normalcy; Lalla dreams of becoming a novelist to escape their grim reality; Regina, widowed by the war, pins her hopes on her infant daughter; Alba chases independence and love. Varying political ideologies, loyalties, and wartime secrets filter through the house, creating a thick net of tension. 

Fausta Cialente’s exquisite prose captures the frailty of the human heart in its desperate search for connection. As the narrative roams from the thoughts of character to character, the residents of the attic consider their own complicity and moral compromises. Tender, thought-provoking, and devastatingly beautiful, A Very Cold Winter is about the impossibility of forgetting the past and the difficulty of living with it.

‘Cause for celebration’ Jhumpa Lahiri

‘A Very Cold Winter is Fausta Cialente’s interpretation of war, family, and of womanhood… What does it take to be time­less but never outdated? This is the mystery and balance which Fausta Cialente’s novel treads. The Italian women writers that mean so much to us today – Ginzburg, de Céspedes, Lalla Romano, Fabri­zia Ramondino – are not modern because we wish them to be. The reason why their work, so easily dis­missed and neglected at that time, is startlingly current is because they were not afraid to imagine womanhood fully on the page, with all its consequences’ Claudia Durastanti

'A Very Cold Winter contends with what it means to move on in the aftermath of war' The New Yorker

‘An exquisite chronicle of frozen hearts and their gradual thaw’ Publishers Weekly