Lies and Sorcery

I loved it and it had been a long time since I had read anything that gave me such life and joy... It was an extraordinary adventure for me to discover, among those chapter titles that felt so nineteenth-century, that the novel was actually describing our own time and place, our own daily existence with lacerating and painful intensity

Natalia Ginzburg

Each plot development is surrounded by acres of commentary whose richness and intensity — deep, dense, psychologically penetrating — provides the story with transformative values, converts melodrama into metaphor

The New York Times

[In Lies and Sorcery] I discovered that an entirely female story—entirely women’s desires and ideas and feelings—could be compelling and, at the same time, have great literary value

Elena Ferrante

The finest Italian novel of modern times

György Lukács

[Lies and Sorcery] is a work of wild abundance and inexhaustible psychological depth....[it] evokes the passage from a traditional society steeped in the values of collectiveness and belonging to one obsessed with power, with the idea that an individual need only impose their will to have what they want....Elsa Morante’s is, undeniably, a grim vision of the world; yet to read Lies and Sorcery in this heroic new translation by Jenny McPhee, always admirably attentive to the original’s delicate balance between archaism and fluency, is exhilarating throughout

Tim Parks, TLS

A social epic tinged with fabulism and written in a sensual and highly ornate prose . . . a writer of conscience, and of brilliance besides

Bailey Trela, The Washington Post

Glittering ironies and brilliant, devastating turns of phrase . . . Morante’s audience had been shaped by the triple-deckers of 19th-century maestros like Dumas, Dickens, Tolstoy and Manzoni. Her novel is a savage spoof of those masterpieces, an enormous work of literary disenchantment. . . a deliciously ornate translation by Jenny McPhee

Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

Slippery, feverish, dreamlike . . . an enveloping tumult of a book . . . an invitation to contemplate stories (fictions? lies?) at the heart of a life . . . sorcery is everywhere, in certain objects, in memories, in the power of love or need or shame, and—most importantly—in the alchemy involved in conjuring something that ought to be true out of the shabby and unsatisfactory materials at hand . . . a potent enchantment prevailed, and for me, the book’s impassioned insistence became an unassailable and transporting reality

Deborah Eisenberg, New York Review of Books

Worth the wait: This multigenerational Sicilian family saga may run to nearly 800 pages in Jenny McPhee’s fantastic new translation, but it’s so pleasurable that you’ll welcome the scope

New York Times Editor’s Choice

An electrifying new translation ...a melodramatic saga of social climbing and doomed romance . . . despite its nineteenth-century veneer, Lies and Sorcery could have only been written in the twentieth century

Jess Bergman, New Yorker

I absolutely love this book. Every page is filled with life, and a life, notwithstanding its pain and longing, that reassures, because it’s done with such attentiveness, intelligence and care, and an ability to perceive and receive so much, and then with seeming effortlessness is reproduced on the page. This is why Morante is one of the most talented writers of the 20th century

Hisham Matar, author of <i> The Return </i>

Thrillingly addictive, magnificent, luxurious . . . as staggering and absorbing as a great 19th-century novel

Catherine Taylor, Telegraph

Spellbinding, exquisite . . . Morante creates something truly modern: a novel about the power of stories and storytelling, both seductive and corrupting . . . every bit as exhilarating to read now as it must have been radical to encounter nearly 80 years ago

Lucy Scholes, Financial Times

A triumph: a fairy tale of epic proportions and a rightly rediscovered 20th-century classic

Francesca Peacock, Spectator

What a thrill that this wild, evocative, compelling novel is at long last fully available in English. Its vivid depictions of how class both imprisons and distorts a person’s sense of self is powerful . . . Lies and Sorcery is a fairy tale with no need for fairies or magic

New Statesman