Forbidden Notebook

Valeria Cossati is a housewife in postwar Rome. She lives a respectable middle-class life in shabby gentility, and she has never thought of herself as unhappy. Then she buys a little black notebook and hides it in a closet, and starts writing down what she thinks and feels.

The habit changes how she sees her days. As she reads her own entries, Valeria begins to question the life she has built around her husband, her daughter and her son. She comes to suspect that her devotion to them and her sense of duty have been smothering her own individuality.

The novel is a domestic drama told from inside her mind, and it keeps close to her private reflections. Tension grows in the household as parents and children, husband and wife, friends and lovers come into conflict. What lies behind the Cossati family's respectable front slowly comes into view, and the family's fragile bonds begin to tear.

Alba de Céspedes was an Italian-Cuban feminist writer. This edition is a modern translation by Ann Goldstein, with a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri. Expect a quiet, intimate and psychologically close read, driven by one woman's growing self-scrutiny rather than by outward events.