Alba de Céspedes Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

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Alba de Céspedes
Alba de Céspedes was born March 11, 1911 in Rome, Italy. She was a Cuban-Italian writer.

Alba was the daughter of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada (a Cuban ambassador to Italy) and Laura Bertini y Alessandri, his Italian wife. A distant cousin of hers was Perucho Figueredo and her grandpa was Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, who is the father of the nation of Cuba.

She worked as a journalist during the 1930s for Epoca, Piccolo, and La Stampa. She wrote her first novel in 1935, called “L’Anima Degli Altri”. Her fiction writing was influenced greatly by the cultural developments which lead to and resulted from World War II.

In her writing, Alba instills her female characters with subjectivity. Her work features a recurring motif of women judging the rightness and wrongness of their actions.

She was jailed for her anti-fascist activities in Italy in 1935. Her novels were also banned. Then again in 1943, she was imprisoned again for her assistance with Radio Partigiana in Bari where she was a Resistance radio personality that was known as Clorinda.

Alba wrote an advice column in Epoca, called Dalla parte di lei from June of 1952 until late in 1958. She also wrote the screenplay for “Le Amiche”, the Michelangelo Antonioni film released in 1955.

Alba had her work featured as part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1936 Summer Olympics.

Alba married Count Giuseppe Antamoro in 1926 and they stayed married until 1931, when they divorced. She was also married to Franco Bounous of the Italian foreign service, later the ambassador to Cyprus and Pakistan.

There was a 1958 letter by Alba, from which it can be evinced they’d agreed to split, which comes from a request Franco made, because of her inability to follow him because of her professional career. The couple eventually stayed together until Franco’s death in 1987.

In October of 1968, she went to the centennial of Cuba’s struggle for independence celebrations. One of the events, which was attended by Fidel Castro, was held in Manzanillo, Cuba, where her grandpa, back in October of 1868, had made a speech against Spain which kicked off the Ten Years’ War. She also donated during that trip to the Cuban National Archives letters that her grandpa between 1871 and 1874 some letters to his wife.

After the war she went to live in Paris, where she lived until her death in 1997 at the age of 86. Even though her books were bestsellers, she has been overlooked in recent studies of Italian female writers.

“There’s No Turning Back” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 1938. Find the astonishingly powerful debut by the beloved feminist author of the brave “Her Side of the Story” which was so subversive that it was banned by the Italian Fascist regime upon its original 1938 publication, and the brilliant “Forbidden Notebook”.

This is a coming-of-age novel which is just as relevant today as it was almost 90 years ago. It centers around 8 women coming from radically different backgrounds that are attending the same college in Rome. Some are there to escape from a scandal or keep a secret, others there to actually study, and during their time there, they experience the challenges of work, love, and emancipation.

Considered to be revolutionary and experimental at the time it was published, this novel established Alba as a powerful new voice during the 20th century. The novel demonstrates why Alba deserves an important place in the canon of women’s literature.

“Her Side of the Story” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 1949. A richly told novel that Alba herself called “the story of a great love and a crime”. While she looks back on her life, Alessandra Corteggiani remembers her youth during the rise of fascism in Italy, the resistance, and Mussolin’s fall, the lives of the women in her family and her working-class neighborhood, rigorously committed to telling “her side of the story”.

Alessandra witnesses her mom, who was an aspiring concert pianist, suffer from the inability to escape from an oppressive marriage. Later on, she gets sent off to live with her dad’s relatives in the country, with the hopes that she will finally learn to submit herself to the patriarchal system and authority. However Alessandra grows ever more rebellious at the farm, conscious of the unjust treatment of hardworking women in her family. When she refuses the marriage proposal from a neighboring farmer, she’s sent back to Rome so that she can tend to her ailing dad.

In Rome, she meets Francesco, this charismatic and anti-fascist professor, who supports and admires her sense of justice and independence. However she quickly comes to recognize that even while she suspects him and is keen to participate in his struggle to reclaim their country from fascism, this respect goes unrequited, and that her own beloved husband is ensnared by patriarchal conventions when it comes to their relationship.

In these pages, Alba delivers a breathtakingly accurate and timeless portrayal of the complexity of the female condition against the backdrop of World War II and the partisan uprising in Italy.

“Forbidden Notebook” is the third stand alone novel and was released in 1952. This is a classic domestic novel centered around the inner life of one dissatisfied housewife living in postwar Rome.

Valeria Cossati never once suspected just how unhappy she had become with the gentility of her bourgeois life, up until she starts jotting down her feelings and thoughts in a small black book that she keeps hidden in a closet. This new secret activity leads her to scrutinize herself and her life much more closely, and she quickly realizes that her individuality is getting stifled by her devotion and sense of duty toward her daughter, husband, and son.

While the conflicts between children and parents, wife and husband, lovers and friends intensify, what happens behind the Cossatis’ facade of middle-class respectability gradually gets revealed, ripping the family’s own fragile fabric to shreds.

This novel is an exquisitely crafted depiction of domestic life, and recognizes the universality of human aspirations.