Bassani's six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be.

Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second World War, The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani's six classic books, fully revised as a single volume by the author at the end of his life: Within the Walls, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Behind the Door, The Heron and The Smell of Hay. These interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters, memorializing not only the Ferrarese people, but the city itself, which assumes a character and a voice deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs.

'Exquisite . . . from his boyhood Ferrara and the families he knew, Bassani has carved out a corner of Italy that rises above regionalism with fiction that can stand alongside the most lingering written in Europe to day' The New York Times