The Queen's Reading Room

If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler

By Italo Calvino

Recommended By Amor Towles

‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel…’ is surely one of the great first sentences in 20th century fiction. At one declarative, wry, and subversive, Calvino both celebrates and overturns the conventions of the novel. In this book, he is like a genius tinkerer building a time machine from the appliances that he’s salvaged from a junkyard.
~ Amor Towles

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Publish Date: 1979

A man realises that, in the copy of the book he recently purchased, a Polish novel has been mistakenly printed on its pages. As he returns to the bookshop the following day, he finds out that a woman is there for the same reason. In this avant-garde novel, the story of the two characters is interspersed with extracts from the stories they read, in a series of parodies of literary genres.

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