Out running an errand, Valeria Cossati gives in to a sudden impulse – she buys a shiny black notbooks. She starts keeping a diary in secret, recording her concerns about her daughter, the constant churn of the domestic routine and her fears that her husband will discover her new habit. With each entry Valeria plunges deeper into her interior life, uncovering profound dissatisfaction and restlessness. As she finds her own voice, the roles that have come to define her-as wife, as mother, as daughter-begin to break apart.

Forbidden Notbooks is a rediscovered jewel of Italian literature, published here in a new translation by the celebrated Ann Goldstein and with a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri. A captivating feminist classic, it is an intimate, haunting story of domestic discontent in postwar Rome, and of one woman’s awakening to her true thoughts and desires.

'Electric… de Céspedes’s novel anticipates the candid confessionals of writers such as Deborah Levy, Sheila Heti and Rachel Cusk… Formally precise, psychologically rich, and suffused in suspicion and suspense, Forbidden Notbooks is an exquisite, tormented howl' Lucy Scholes Financial Times

'I don’t think I’ve read a finer unpicking of a complex mother-daughter relationship… A damning portrait emerges of the prisons on which modern family life is built. It is devastatingly effective, a tour de force' Sunday Times