Her Side of the Story

"DeCespedes' work has lost none of its subversive forceThe New York Times Book ReviewFrom the author of Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Cspedes, a richly told novel shecalled the story of a great love and of a crime.As she looks back on her life, Alessandra Corteggiani recalls her youth during the rise of fascism in Italy, the resistance, and the fall of Mussolini, the lives of the women in her family and her working-class neighborhood, rigorously committed to telling her side of the story.Alessandra witnesses her mother, an aspiring concert pianist, suffer from the inability to escape her oppressive marriage. Later, she is sent away to live with her father's relatives in the country, in the hope shell finally learn to submit herself to the patriarchal system and authority. But at the farm, Alessandra grows increasingly rebellious, conscious of the unjust treatment of...