Martin Clark

Ignazio Silone was one of Italy’s most respected 20th-century novelists. His best-known work, Fontamara, is a dramatic account of peasant life in the Abruzzi, where he was born in 1900. He was always a political, or perhaps an anthropological, novelist, portraying the values of his cafoni with a wonderful, sympathetic realism; but he also had a very sharp eye for the way political power...