There's No Turning Back: A Novel

by Alba De Céspedes, Ann Goldstein (Translator)

Overview

Discover the “boundary-breaking” (LitHub) debut novel by the beloved feminist author of the “brilliant” (The Wall Street Journal) Forbidden Notebook and the “courageous” (The Washington Post) Her Side of the Story that was so subversive, it was banned by the Italian Fascist regime when it was first published in 1938.

A coming-of-age novel that is as relevant today as it was nearly ninety years ago, There’s No Turning Back centers on eight women with radically different backgrounds who attend the same college in Rome. Some are there to study, others to escape a scandal, or keep a secret, and during their time there, they experience the challenges of love, work, and emancipation.

Considered experimental and revolutionary at the time, this novel established Alba de Céspedes as “one of Italy’s most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked writers” (Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize winner). Translated by Ann Goldstein, There’s No Turning Back demonstrates why de Céspedes deserves “an important place in the canon of women’s literature” (Chicago Review of Books).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668083635
Publisher:	Washington Square Press
Publication date:	02/11/2025
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Alba de Céspedes (1911–1997) was a bestselling Italian Cuban feminist writer greatly influenced by the cultural developments that lead to and resulted from World War II. Along with being imprisoned for her anti-fascist work, several of her novels were banned in Italy. After the war, she moved to Paris, where she lived until her death in 1997.

Editorial Reviews

Ruthlessly, thrillingly, unsentimental.... magnificently savage. ... As with many literary “rediscoveries”, to read de Céspedes for the first time brings both exhilaration and humility, a reordering of one’s mental bookshelves. There’s No Turning Back was written decades before Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963) or Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) – two equally transgressive tales of febrile academic friendship. And the tectonic violence that erupts in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet quartet was rumbling underneath the Grimaldi well over half a century earlier.”
—Beejay Silcox, Times Literary Supplement

“De Céspedes is masterfully in control of her ensemble in this energetic, timeless coming-of-age story, deftly translated by Ann Goldstein. To reveal almost anything that happens after the first page would be to spoil the way the novel’s small disclosures add up. Its power is in revealing what happens to ordinary people with ordinarily complicated lives.”
—Lily Herd Literary Review

"THE GROUP by Mary McCarthy meets RED BOOK OF FAREWELLS by Pirkko Saisio. Phenomenal novel about college aged women in the fascist 1930s of Rome. Translated by the reliably brilliant Ann Goldstein from the Italian."
—Charlie Jones, A Room of One's Own Bookstore

"With its imperfect, passionate characters, and its passages of intense analysis of their relationships and their inner lives, Céspedes’s novel will appeal to fans of Ferrante and Natalia Ginzburg. Reading the book in times nearly as chaotic as those in which it was published delivers a kind of subversive pleasure."
—The Washington Post

“Readers looking for tips on how to annoy a fascist government will savor Alba de Céspedes's magnificently incendiary novel , first published in Italy in 1938, during Mussolini's reign... This feminist manifesto about ‘eight young women living in a convent-boarding house in Rome,’ infuriated authorities so much that the government blocked further publication, albeit after 20 printings. This translation, based on de Céspedes's 1966 final revision, shows contemporary audiences what all the fuss was about. ‘To free herself from the tyranny of the man, the woman has to take his place,’ Augusta warns. Mussolini must have loved that line. Enlightened modern readers genuinely will, however, along with the rest of this forward-thinking novel.”
—Michael Magras, Shelf Awareness [starred review]

“Magnificently savage. Translated into English for the first time by Ann Goldstein, with characteristic muscle. . . . The radical pleasure of de Céspedes [is] watching her stalk the pages of this novel, like the iron-hearted Sister Prudenzia, and extinguish all the moralizing. There is a sure-fire way out of purgatory, she shows us, and it is not good behavior... To read de Céspedes for the first time brings both exhilaration and humility, a reordering of one’s mental bookshelves. There’s No Turning Back was written decades before Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963) or Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) – two equally transgressive tales of febrile academic friendship. And the tectonic violence that erupts in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet was rumbling underneath the Grimaldi well over half a century earlier. That Ferrante and Alba de Céspedes share a translator makes that literary connection feel direct, but the deep pleasure here is the opportunity – the invitation – to trace it through decades of Italian neorealism: to turn back.”
—Beejay Silcox, Times Literary Supplement

"Goldstein is an indomitable translator. Without her, how would you read Ferrante? Here, she takes her pen to a work by the great Cuban-Italian writer de Céspedes, banned in the fascist Italy of the 1930s, that follows a group of female literature students living together in a Roman boarding house."
—The Millions' Most Anticipated books of Winter 2025

"Boundary-breaking...If you’re looking to rediscover historically significant (but often ignored) female authors this year, There’s No Turning Back is a great place to start."
—A LitHub "Most Anticipated Book of 2025"

"The Italian Fascist government once banned [There's No Turning Back] because of its feminist themes, but it lives on with Ann Goldstein’s translation.
—S.T.L., A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Winter

"De Céspedes writes with blazing urgency about the hidden lives of women realizing that they are being suffocated by the very institutions that claim to protect them. A book so incendiary it’s practically hot to the touch."
—Sarah Chihaya, author of Bibliophobia

"One of Italy’s most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked writers."
—Jhumpa Lahiri

"Reading Alba de Céspedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe: social class, feelings, atmosphere."
—Annie Ernaux

"De Céspedes’ work has lost none of its subversive force."
—Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review

"Alba de Céspedes wrote novels in the 1940s and 1950s that were radically contemporary, both then and now . . . [her] fiction is written with an acute sense of responsibility to tell the truth."
—Elena Lappin, The Washington Post

"If you’re a Ferrante fan, you’ll likely love de Céspedes’ piercing prose, as it probes the inner lives of women searching for meaning in a patriarchal Italian culture and facing the distance between who they’ve become and who they’d like to be."
—Julianne McShane, Mother Jones

“De Céspedes combines intimate revelation about women’s bodily and emotional lives with a deep moral seriousness about the need for change within marriage as an institution and within women’s lives.”
—Lara Feigel, The Guardian

“De Céspedes’ account of the alienating, confining, tenacious force of the family endures."
—Eleanor Careless, The New Inquiry

From the Publisher