Family Lexicon

Synopsis

‘The places, events and people are all real. I have invented nothing.’

Natalia Ginzburg wrote her masterful autobiographical novel Family Lexicon while living in London in the 1960s. Homesick for her Italian family, she summoned them in this celebration of the routines and rituals, in-jokes and insults and, above all, the repeated sayings that make up every family.

Giuseppe Levi is a Jewish scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking. Impatient and intractable, he is constantly at odds with his impressionable and wistful wife Lidia – yet he cannot be without her. Together they preside over their five children in a house filled with argument and activity, books and politics, visitors, friends and famous faces. But as their children grow up against the backdrop of Mussolini’s Italy, the Levi household must become more than just a home, but a stronghold against fascism.

Intimate, enchanting and comedic, Family Lexicon is an unforgettable novel about language, memory, and the lasting power that family holds over all of us.

Author

One of the most renowned and distinctive voices in postwar Italian literature, Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991) has been praised for her inimitable style and her unforgettable novels depicting private lives in a disrupted social landscape. A prolific dramatist as well as essayist and novelist, she is best known in this country for her novels All Our Yesterdays, The City and the House, and Voices in the Evening, as well as her autobiographical work The Things We Used to Say, and her biography of the great nineteenth century man of letters Alessandro Manzoni. Ginzburg grew up in Turin and spent most of her adult life in Rome.