If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

First published in Italian in 1979, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller begins with a familiar pleasure: a reader settling down with a new novel, only to discover that the book is incomplete. Determined to find the missing pages, the Reader becomes entangled in a chain of interrupted stories, each opening onto a different world of intrigue, desire, conspiracy or uncertainty. Alongside this shifting narrative, a second story unfolds through the Reader’s encounters with Ludmilla, another devoted reader whose search for a complete book becomes inseparable from the pleasures of reading itself. Calvino transforms this simple premise into a playful, intricately constructed meditation on beginnings, endings and the elusive relationship between a story and the person who receives it.

Moving between detective fiction, romance, political intrigue and literary pastiche, the novel continually unsettles the conventions through which readers make sense of fiction. Its ingenious structure is both an invitation and a gentle provocation, asking who controls a story, what makes a book feel complete, and why we are so compelled to turn the page. A defining work of Calvino’s later career, it belongs to the experimental tradition of postmodern literature while retaining the wit, clarity and imaginative generosity that distinguish his writing. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is at once a novel about reading and an exhilarating demonstration of how many different novels can exist within a single book.

From the book

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.”

— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller