A masterwork by the incomparable, genre-defying, wondrous Italo Calvino.
You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero of them all is you, the reader.
'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell
'A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction' Guardian
Ingenious ― Mail on Sunday
Breathtakingly inventive
The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century ― Guardian
Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you're usually too busy laughing to go mad... I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends
A devastating, wonderfully ingenious parody of all those dreary best-sellers you buy at the airport... It is a "world novel": take it with you next time you plan to travel in an armchair ― Observer
