The Dry Heart

‘This book is a Roman candle – quick and explosive.’ – New York Times

The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: ‘I shot him between the eyes.’

As the tale – a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and revenge – proceeds, the narrator’s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability.

Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg’s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don’t more wives kill their husbands?

‘The Dry Heart is by far Ginzburg’s strangest work of fiction. . . Short enough to read in one sitting, it’s a feminist classic that exposes the dark side of marriage in clean, captivating prose.’ – Chicago Tribune

‘One of the great Italian writers of the 20th Century…[her] books snare so much of what is odd and lovely and fleeting in the world.’ – Parul Sehgal, New York Times

Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like.’ – Rachel Cusk

‘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