Discover the astonishingly powerful debut novel by the beloved feminist author of the “brilliant” (The Wall Street Journal) Forbidden Notebook and the “courageous” (The Washington Post) Her Side of the Story that was so subversive, it was banned by the Italian Fascist regime when it was first published in 1938.
A coming-of-age novel that is as relevant today as it was nearly ninety years ago, There’s No Turning Back centers on eight women with radically different backgrounds who attend the same college in Rome. Some are there to study, others to escape a scandal, or keep a secret, and during their time there, they experience the challenges of love, work, and emancipation.
Considered experimental and revolutionary at the time, this novel established Alba de Céspedes as a powerful new voice in the 20th century. Translated by Ann Goldstein, There’s No Turning Back demonstrates why de Céspedes deserves “an important place in the canon of women’s literature” (Chicago Review of Books).
"THE GROUP by Mary McCarthy meets RED BOOK OF FAREWELLS by Pirkko Saisio. Phenomenal novel about college aged women in the fascist 1930s of Rome. Translated by the reliably brilliant Ann Goldstein from the Italian."
—Charlie Jones, A Room of One's Own Bookstore
"With its imperfect, passionate characters, and its passages of intense analysis of their relationships and their inner lives, Céspedes’s novel will appeal to fans of Ferrante and Natalia Ginzburg. Reading the book in times nearly as chaotic as those in which it was published delivers a kind of subversive pleasure."
—The Washington Post
“Readers looking for tips on how to annoy a fascist government will savor Alba de Céspedes's magnificently incendiary novel , first published in Italy in 1938, during Mussolini's reign… This feminist manifesto about ‘eight young women living in a convent-boarding house in Rome,’ infuriated authorities so much that the government blocked further publication, albeit after 20 printings. This translation, based on de Céspedes's 1966 final revision, shows contemporary audiences what all the fuss was about. ‘To free herself from the tyranny of the man, the woman has to take his place,’ Augusta warns. Mussolini must have loved that line. Enlightened modern readers genuinely will, however, along with the rest of this forward-thinking novel.”
—Michael Magras, Shelf Awareness [starred review]
“Magnificently savage. Translated into English for the first time by Ann Goldstein, with characteristic muscle. . . . The radical pleasure of de Céspedes [is] watching her stalk the pages of this novel, like the iron-hearted Sister Prudenzia, and extinguish all the moralizing. There is a sure-fire way out of purgatory, she shows us, and it is not good behavior… To read de Céspedes for the first time brings both exhilaration and humility, a reordering of one’s mental bookshelves. There’s No Turning Back was written decades before Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963) or Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) – two equally transgressive tales of febrile academic friendship. And the tectonic violence that erupts in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet was rumbling underneath the Grimaldi well over half a century earlier. That Ferrante and Alba de Céspedes share a translator makes that literary connection feel direct, but the deep pleasure here is the opportunity – the invitation – to trace it through decades of Italian neorealism: to turn back.”
—Beejay Silcox, Times Literary Supplement
