A Silence Shared

Reviews / Votes

Telling of wartime occupation, the lives of resistance fighters and a bleak, snow-covered countryside, its domestic and political tensions rival the best of Natalia Ginzburg -- Francesca Peacock * Spectator, Books of the Year * A marvel. All silence and noticing, glimpses and wonder. I've not read anything quite like it before -- Sunjeev Sahota, Booker Prize-longlisted author of China Room Her work deserves to be read alongside other titans of 20th-century Italian literature such as Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino (all of whom knew and revered her)... Told with magnificent restraint, and without the tensions ever breaking the novel's serene, crystalline structure, A Silence Shared is a wonderful taste of Romano's work * Spectator * Romano writes in a dreamlike present, which is to say the present that appears to us in dreams... clear and full of shadows, concrete and out of reach -- Natalia Ginzburg Exquisite * Irish Times * When a book is praised by three of Italy's greatest 20th-century writers - Giorgio Bassani, Italo Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg - you pay attention... Through short scenes and spare dialogue, Romano successfully creates a mood of stasis, anticipation and guilt * Guardian * Thanks to this new translation... another unveiling of a great Italian writer is about to begin... Her writing fascinates because so much of it circles around how we construct and remember the lives we lead, those moments and elements that are mysterious and impossible to communicate * LA Review of Books * Successful to the point of perfection. There's not a word, not a sentence in the novel that doesn't add to the refined music-verging on silence-that's so characteristic of [Romano] -- Giorgio Bassani, author of 'The Garden of the Finzi-Continis' A subtle and captivating story, always right there... An incredibly complex and tough knot of human ties, [explored] with a heightened sensitivity that never falters -- Italo Calvino, author of 'If on a winter's night a traveller' I was struck straightaway by the singular force of her taut, meditative, sorrowful writing... I admired her concise sentences, brief chapters, and distilled language -- Jhumpa Lahiri, author of 'The Namesake' I adored A Silence Shared. It's a thoroughly hypnotic novel, full of beauty and sadness, written with such brilliance and meticulous care -- Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither