One of the most unusual love affairs in literature, If On A Winter?s Night A Traveller is a captivating game of suspense into which we are irresistibly pulled. (1995)

Review

"[Italo Calvino is] one of the world's best fabulists."
--John Gardner, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"Calvino is a wizard."
--Mary McCarthy, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
"[Calvino] manages to charm and entertain the reader in the teeth of a scheme designed to frustrate all reasonable readerly expectations."
--John Updike, THE NEW YORKER
"Calvino is that very rare phenomenon, a true original . . . If on a winter's night a traveler is breathtakingly complex and self-conscious (there are moments when it quite literally makes one gasp with astonishment) . . . [yet it] is one of the most accessible and enchanting novels written in the last fifty years."
--from the Introduction by Peter Washington

About the Author

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. During the war he was a member of the Italian Resistance and joined the Communist Party, although he later left in 1957. One of the most respected writers of our time, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1981 he was awarded the prestigious French Legion d’Honneur. He died in Siena in 1985.

Italo Calvino (15 October 1923-19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). Lionised in Britain and America, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.