Among Women Only

First time in paperback, a powerful depiction of disillusionment and self-alienation in post-war Italy by a master novelist<p>Among Women Only, published two years before Pavese's death, won Italy's highest literary honor, the Strega Prize. Considered to be one of the chief sources for post-war Italian realism, it captures the pervading melancholy and emptiness of a society caught up in decadence and hedonism. Clelia, a successful couturier, returns to her native Turin to supervise the opening of a salon in the city where she spent her youth in poverty. She is drawn into a circle of fashionable young people and a world of restaurants and casinos, artists' studios and parties. Amidst this crowd of people who are trying to escape the futility and boredom of their lives in a mindless search for pleasure, she meets the solitary figure of Rosetta, whose suicide at the end of the story tragically foreshadows Pavese's own.