A Very Cold Winter
A Very Cold Winter
Fausta Cialente
Translated from the Italian by Julia Nelsen
“Cause for celebration.”—Jhumpa Lahiri
A novel of secrets and female solidarity set in post-war Milan, by one of Italy’s most significant women writers.
Fausta Cialente (1898–1994) was a novelist, journalist, political activist, and one of the first self-declared feminist Italian writers. Though the fascists censored her early work, she continued as an active member in the anti-fascist movement while living abroad in Egypt, writing pamphlets and making daily broadcasts from Radio Cairo against the Italian regime. She returned home after the war and eventually began publishing again, winning Italy’s most important literary award, the Strega Prize, in 1976.
In A Very Cold Winter, it is 1946 and Milan is in ruins. A woman named 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 incubate 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. As the narrative roams from the thoughts of character to character, the residents of this “hotel for the poor” consider their own complicity and moral compromises, wondering if they’re able to escape the weight of what they’ve lived through.
Fausta Cialente’s exquisite prose captures the frailty of the human heart in its desperate search for connection. An introduction from author and Italian translator Claudia Durastanti frames this classic feminist icon for the modern American reader. 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.
Praise for A Very Cold Winter
“Cialente was a pioneering feminist, anti-fascist writer with a profound literary sensibility. In this crucial account of post-war Italy, her rootless authorial perspective sheds unique light on individual, collective, and national trauma, and speaks to ever-relevant questions about what it means to be a woman, a foreigner, and a survivor. Julia Nelsen’s engrossing English translation is cause for celebration.”—Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Namesake
“The first of the undersung Fausta Cialente's books to appear in English... A Very Cold Winter contends with what it means to move on in the aftermath of war."—The New Yorker
“Overdue… An exquisite chronicle of frozen hearts and their gradual thaw.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Entrancing... Rich with sensual observations and insights.”—Foreword Reviews
“Cialente builds a layered pastiche of contrasts: Death and birth, sunny memories against gloomy present, simplicity next to sophistication, and always public versus private... [A] gem."—Kirkus Reviews
"[A Very Cold Winter] offers a stark and uncompromising portrait of debasement in post-war Milan, a city scarred by misery, social erosion, and loss... Cialente contends that the labor of self-determination is the essential prerequisite for restoring a conscience that is at once personal and shared—the prelude to a collective awakening that, to this day, is yet to come."—Asymptote
“Cialente’s style as rendered by Nelsen has a centrifugal quality... [she] valorizes everyday life as a site of struggle, too, a place just as world-historical and worthy of our attention as war or political history."—Full Stop
“A somewhat frequent thought I have when reading fiction in translation is ‘how was this not translated to English already?’ and Fausta Cialente’s A Very Cold Winter is the epitome of that expression. I was instantly swept up in her luxurious prose, playful but particular. Camilla is a classic 20th-century feminist heroine in Italian literature.” — Charlie Jones, A Room of One’s Own Bookstore (Madison, WI)
Product Info
Publication Date: January 20, 2026
Fiction
Paperback | 5.25 x 8 | 250 pages
Rights: WE
979-8-893380-23-1