If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
  • Published: 5 April 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099430896
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

Formats & editions
Paperback
5 Apr 2002
Hardback
20 Dec 2023
EBook
1 Jun 2011
Hardback
15 Jun 1993
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'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell

A masterwork by the incomparable, genre-defying, wondrous Italo Calvino.

You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero of them all is you, the reader.

'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell

'A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction' Guardian
  • Published: 5 April 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099430896
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

Also by Italo Calvino

The Distance of the Moon
Invisible Cities
Last Comes the Raven
Cosmicomics
The Narrative of Trajan's Column
The Baron in the Trees
The Written World and the Unwritten World
See all

Praise for If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

Ingenious

Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

Mind-bending and thoroughly post-modern, Calvino's masterpiece of self-reference ('you' are part of the plot), its dizzyingly clever, labyrinthine construction has made it a classic

Marc Chacksfield, ShortList

Breathtakingly inventive

David Mitchell

The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century

Guardian

Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you're usually too busy laughing to go mad... I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends

Salman Rushdie

A devastating, wonderfully ingenious parody of all those dreary best-sellers you buy at the airport... It is a "world novel": take it with you next time you plan to travel in an armchair

Lorna Sage, Observer

A brilliant work of the imagination and the intellect working in union. And, by the way, it's very funny also

Scotsman
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