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  • Published: 5 April 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099430896
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller




'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

About the author

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. One of the most respected writers of the twentieth century, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1973 he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. He died in 1985. A collection of Calvino's posthumous personal writings, The Hermit in Paris, was published in 2003.

Also by Italo Calvino

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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