The Betrothed

“An important new translation . . . It feels strange to have had a bona fide canonical classic hiding in plain sight for all these years. But with [Michael F.] Moore’s vigorous and companionable translation, the book is now here for everyone to see. . . . Now the English-speaking world can discover what the fuss is all about.”—The Wall Street Journal

“The Betrothed emerges in the new translation as a work that anyone who cares about nineteenth-century fiction should want to read. It has the great events—war, famine, plague—and the record of their impact on humble people. It has the sentimentality: demure maidens and brave lads and black-hearted villains. It has passages of lyrical description and passages where the specificity of detail verges on the sociological. It has the prolixity, annoying to some, comforting to others. In other words, it is an exemplary historical novel.”—The New Yorker

“Michael F. Moore’s new version strikes me as remarkable, extraordinarily well pitched, finding the right levels of colloquialism and eloquence. Moore preserves the heteroglossia of the novel, its rich impasto of spoken and written styles whose incompatibility is one of its deep subjects. And he manages to catch Manzoni’s narrative voice, which is not easy to characterize.”—Peter Brooks, The New York Review of Books

“This is not just a book; it offers consolation to the whole of humanity.”—Giuseppe Verdi