Voices in the Evening
"In a quiet Italian town after World War Two, Elsa lives with her parents in the house where she was born. Twenty-seven and unmarried, she is a constant concern to her obsessive, hypochondriac mother. But her mother does not know that Elsa has fallen in love with Tommasino, the elusive youngest son of the De Francisci family, who own the textile factory that dominates the town. Over the course of their secret meetings, Elsa begins to imagine a future with Tommasino, free from the constraints of expectations and burdensome history. But this is all threatened by exposure. An elegant and beautifully re-strained novel that scratches at the fragility of postwar consciousness, Voices in the Evening is an unforgettable story about first love and lost chances"--