The Girl on the Via Flaminia

(Paperback)

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Description

A dark love story set in wartime Rome from the author of In Love and Your Face for the World to See Rome, December 1944. The city has been liberated by the Allies, but no one feels like celebrating. A bitter wind blows down Via Flaminia, where Signora Adela Pulcini keeps her boarding house and discreetly finds Italian girls for lonely America soldiers. Robert is one such soldier; Lisa is the girl procured to keep him company in return for food and shelter. But the simple exchange doesn't go to plan, as Robert and Lisa find themselves tangled in a dark, mutually destructive affair. Exposing the fault-lines between men and women, the old and new worlds, and victor and vanquished, Hayes's spare, taut novel is an incisive portrayal of sexual economics and the dark side of love.

Reviews

A superb short novel ... The Hemingway influence is clear, but Hayes is his own man, a master of irony and ambiguity ... An enthralling narrative, and art of a high order

* Kirkus Reviews *
It is a bigger story than it seems to be, for it has implications that spread through the city and the world * The New York Times *
Hayes has done for bruised men what Jean Rhys does for bruised women, and they both write heartbreakingly beautiful sentences * Guardian *
A sensitive and gorgeously wrought study of connections and misconnections, this masterpiece of the period perfectly captures a short, but unique, period in history * Mostly Fiction *
Hayes balances a bitter depiction of an unforgiving world with sympathy for the sad evasive manoeuvres of the human psyche... His novels perfectly capture the texture of midcentury American life ... His work must come back to us in all its brutal honesty * Los Angeles Review of Books *

Author Bio

Alfred Hayes (1911-1985) was born in London and grew up in New York, where he later worked as a newspaperman. After joining the army in 1943 he served with the US forces in Italy. While in Rome he met Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini on the film Pais , and began his career in script-writing. He moved to Hollywood to work in the movies and was twice nominated for an Oscar for his scripts. Hayes' seven novels include The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949), In Love (1953), My Face for the World to See (1958) and The End of Me (1968).