Published just months before his suicide in 1950, this novel won Italy's prestigious Strega Prize and has gone on to become one of Cesare Pavese's (1908-1950) most popular novels and was filmed by Michelangelo Antonioni. A successful couturier returns to Turin, the city in which she grew up, at the end of WW II. Opening a salon of her own leads her into a nihilistic circle of young hedonists, including the charismatic Rosetta, whose tragic death forms the novel's climax. But Turin itself is at the heart of the novel, its pervading melancholy deftly rendered by a master craftsman. Extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings.""-Italo Calvino ""One of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century.""-Susan Sontag