The Dry Heart

“Ginzburg never raises her voice, never strains for effect, never judges her creations. Like Chekhov, she knows how to stand back and let her characters expose their own lives, their frailties and strengths, their illusions and private griefs. The result is nearly translucent writing — writing so clear, so direct, so seemingly simple that it gives the reader the magical sense of apprehending the world for the first time.”

— Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Her prose style is deceptively simple and very complex. Its effect on the reader is both calming and thrilling — that’s not so easy to do.”

— Deborah Levy

“Her sentences have great precision and clarity, and I learn a lot when I read her.”

— Zadie Smith

“I’m always drawn to short novels that pack a punch — Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline (101 pages), Willem Frederick Hermans’s An Untouched House (88 pages), and José Revueltas’s The Hole (79 pages) are all the more powerful for how brief they are. It’s less about finding the time to read Natalia Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart, an 83-page novel about an Italian woman who shoots and kills her husband on page one, than it is preparing yourself for it.”

— Gabe Habash, Publishers Weekly Best Summer Reads 2019

“If Ferrante is a friend, Ginzburg is a mentor.”

— The Guardian

“Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original.”

— Rachel Cusk

“Filled with shimmering, risky, darting observation.”

— Colm Tóibín

“The raw beauty of Ginzburg’s prose compels our gaze. First we look inward, with the shock of recognition inspired by all great writing, and then, inevitably, out at the shared world she evokes with such uncompromising clarity.”

—Hilma Wolitzer

“There is no one quite like Ginzburg for telling it like it is.”

—Phillip Lopate

“Ginzburg’s beautiful words have such solidity and simplicity. I read her with joy and amazement.”

—Tessa Hadley

“Her simplicity is an achievement, hard-won and remarkable, and the more welcome in a literary world where the cloak of omniscience is all too readily donned.”

—William Weaver, The New York Times