Novel of Ferrara, The by Giorgio Bassani, Jamie McKendrik (Translator), André Aciman (Foreword); 2018. Hardcover.

The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani's six classics, fully revised 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".

Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second World War, these interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters: the respected doctor whose homosexuality is tolerated until he is humiliatingly exposed by an exploitative youth; a survivor of the Nazi death camps whose neighbors' celebration of his return gradually turns to ostracism; a young man discovering the ugly, treacherous price that people will pay for a sense of belonging; the Jewish aristocrat whose social position has been erased; the indomitable schoolteacher, Celia Trotti, whose Communist idealism disturbs and challenges a postwar generation. The Novel of Ferrara memorializes 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.