A Novel

History

Elsa Morante was an Italian novelist, poet, and translator. She was born in 1912 in Rome and wrote her debut novel, Lies and Sorcery, while hiding in the countryside during the German occupation of Italy in the Second World War. Alongside Lies and Sorcery, which won the Viareggio Prize, Morante’s novels include Arturo’s Island, which was awarded the Strega Prize, and History: A Novel which became a national bestseller in Italy on publication. She died in 1985.

Elsa Morante

Jenny McPhee

Thrillingly addictive, magnificent, luxurious . . . as staggering and absorbing as a great 19th-century novel

Spellbinding, exquisite . . . Morante creates something truly modern: a novel about the power of stories and storytelling, both seductive and corrupting . . . every bit as exhilarating to read now as it must have been radical to encounter nearly 80 years ago

A triumph: a fairy tale of epic proportions and a rightly rediscovered 20th-century classic

What a thrill that this wild, evocative, compelling novel is at long last fully available in English. Its vivid depictions of how class both imprisons and distorts a person’s sense of self is powerful . . . Lies and Sorcery is a fairy tale with no need for fairies or magic

I absolutely love this book. Every page is filled with life, and a life, notwithstanding its pain and longing, that reassures, because it’s done with such attentiveness, intelligence and care, and an ability to perceive and receive so much, and then with seeming effortlessness is reproduced on the page. This is why Morante is one of the most talented writers of the 20th century

Hisham Matar, author of The Return

I loved it and it had been a long time since I had read anything that gave me such life and joy... It was an extraordinary adventure for me to discover, among those chapter titles that felt so nineteenth-century, that the novel was actually describing our own time and place, our own daily existence with lacerating and painful intensity

[In Lies and Sorcery] I discovered that an entirely female story—entirely women’s desires and ideas and feelings—could be compelling and, at the same time, have great literary value

Each plot development is surrounded by acres of commentary whose richness and intensity &mdash; deep, dense, psychologically penetrating &mdash; provides the story with transformative values, converts melodrama into metaphor

[Lies and Sorcery] is a work of wild abundance and inexhaustible psychological depth....[it] evokes the passage from a traditional society steeped in the values of collectiveness and belonging to one obsessed with power, with the idea that an individual need only impose their will to have what they want....Elsa Morante’s is, undeniably, a grim vision of the world; yet to read Lies and Sorcery in this heroic new translation by Jenny McPhee, always admirably attentive to the original’s delicate balance between archaism and fluency, is exhilarating throughout

An electrifying new translation ...a melodramatic saga of social climbing and doomed romance . . . despite its nineteenth-century veneer, Lies and Sorcery could have only been written in the twentieth century

A social epic tinged with fabulism and written in a sensual and highly ornate prose . . . a writer of conscience, and of brilliance besides

The finest Italian novel of modern times

Glittering ironies and brilliant, devastating turns of phrase . . . Morante’s audience had been shaped by the triple-deckers of 19th-century maestros like Dumas, Dickens, Tolstoy and Manzoni. Her novel is a savage spoof of those masterpieces, an enormous work of literary disenchantment. . . a deliciously ornate translation by Jenny McPhee

Slippery, feverish, dreamlike . . . an enveloping tumult of a book . . . an invitation to contemplate stories (fictions? lies?) at the heart of a life . . . sorcery is everywhere, in certain objects, in memories, in the power of love or need or shame, and—most importantly—in the alchemy involved in conjuring something that ought to be true out of the shabby and unsatisfactory materials at hand . . . a potent enchantment prevailed, and for me, the book’s impassioned insistence became an unassailable and transporting reality

Worth the wait: This multigenerational Sicilian family saga may run to nearly 800 pages in Jenny McPhee’s fantastic new translation, but it’s so pleasurable that you’ll welcome the scope

Elisa – orphaned as a child, raised by a ‘fallen woman’, fed by fairy tales – has lived in an outlandish imaginary world for years. When her guardian dies, she feels compelled to confront her family’s tortured and dramatic past, weaving the tale of her mother and grandmother through a history of intrigue, treachery, deception and desire. But as her saga of three generations of Sicilian women proceeds, it becomes something else entirely, taking in a whole legacy of oppression and injustice. By turns flamboyant and intense, raging and funny, Lies and Sorcery is a celebration of the female imagination, and the power of storytelling itself. 
 
First published in 1948, Elsa Morante’s debut novel won the Viareggio Prize and earned her the lasting admiration of generations of writers from Italo Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg to Elena Ferrante. 
 
Translated by Jenny McPhee

Elsa Morante

Praise for Lies and Sorcery

Thrillingly addictive, magnificent, luxurious . . . as staggering and absorbing as a great 19th-century novel

Spellbinding, exquisite . . . Morante creates something truly modern: a novel about the power of stories and storytelling, both seductive and corrupting . . . every bit as exhilarating to read now as i ...

A triumph: a fairy tale of epic proportions and a rightly rediscovered 20th-century classic

Thrillingly addictive, magnificent, luxurious . . . as staggering and absorbing as a great 19th-century novel

Spellbinding, exquisite . . . Morante creates something truly modern: a novel about the power of stories and storytelling, both seductive and corrupting . . . every bit as exhilarating to read now as i ...

A triumph: a fairy tale of epic proportions and a rightly rediscovered 20th-century classic

Thrillingly addictive, magnificent, luxurious . . . as staggering and absorbing as a great 19th-century novel

Spellbinding, exquisite . . . Morante creates something truly modern: a novel about the power of stories and storytelling, both seductive and corrupting . . . every bit as exhilarating to read now as i ...

A triumph: a fairy tale of epic proportions and a rightly rediscovered 20th-century classic

Books by Elsa Morante

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