Natalia Ginzburg’s first novel, The Road to the City (1942, tr: Francis Frenaye, 1952) is a coming-of-age of story, cool in its delivery, and hard in its truth. The opening line appears to riff on the opening line in Anna Karenina, setting us up to realise that the narrator is from the long line of Tolstoy’s unhappy families. And the poor family in this book are far from happy, from the easily angered father, free with his fists, restless brothers, and an adopted cousin, who reads and drinks in secret.

It’s told by Delia, the family’s second daughter, and a somewhat selfish and unsentimental woman, looking back on her youth to when she lived in a country town and dreamed of both being married and moving, as her sister had done when she was the same age, to the nearby city. A woman in search of an independent career will face factory work or housework; marriage would mean she need not lift a finger. Marriage would also be an escape from the narrow-minded confines of her crowded home.

It’s a dalliance in the woods leading to a pregnancy which sets off an explosion in many lives. Ambitions are cut short; families are shamed; relationships falter; and, if Delia wasn’t bored enough, she’s packed off to her aunt’s, even further from the city, to see it out. There’s a naivete to young Delia, believing that everyone should be in love, though every relationship around her appears broken in some way. Though her own predicament, as her parents attempt to broker a wedding with the father, makes her face up to who she really loves but also what she really wants.

The novel, ambiguous in time and place, becomes universal; we recognise its world, its people. Here, in Ginzburg’s world, nobody comes out of the book with any warmth and though we care for the story told, we care not for them. They are harsh, like their environment. The matter-of-fact delivery only makes everything seem frostier even under the Italian sun. But they feel real and their fates are nothing but inevitable. It’s a sober account of hard times showing that there are many ways to survive an inescapable life, but the road to the city, to happiness, is strewn with disappointment.