{"product_id":"the-blind-woman-of-sorrento","title":"The Blind Woman of Sorrento","description":"\u003cp\u003eA Gothic masterwork of nineteenth-century Naples. Now in its first modern English translation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNaples, 1840. In the anatomy hall of the Hospital for the Incurables, a young medical student stands over his dead sister's body and makes a vow. What follows is one of the most gripping novels of the Italian Romantic era: a story of hidden identity, buried crimes, a blind woman of extraordinary perception, and a city where justice moves slowly but with terrible force.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBeatrice Rionero has been blind since childhood, raised by her widowed father in a villa above the Bay of Sorrento. When a mysterious foreign physician, Dr. Oliviero Blackman, arrives, he claims to offer her the chance of sight. But Blackman is not what he appears. And neither is anyone else in this labyrinthine story of secrets, vengeance, and redemption.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrancesco Mastriani (1819-1891) was the great chronicler of Neapolitan society, a writer sometimes compared to Dickens and Eugène Sue, whose serialized fiction drew enormous popular audiences while unflinching in its portrait of class, injustice, and the hidden lives of the poor. La Cieca di Sorrento (1852) is his best-known novel: a work of Gothic sensation and moral seriousness, vivid and at times harrowing in its depictions of injustice and violence, set in the streets and drawing rooms, courtrooms and catacombs of nineteenth-century Naples.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis first modern literary English translation, by Idara Crespi, restores the full force of Mastriani's prose: its declarative rhythms, its operatic emotional peaks, its dark comedy, and its portrait of a blind woman whose inner sight surpasses everyone around her. Mastriani's Naples is rendered on its own terms: the social attitudes, the hierarchies of class and gender, the constraints his characters navigate. These belong to 1840, preserved without modernization, because that fidelity is what makes the novel genuinely of its world.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor readers of Wilkie Collins, Eugène Sue, and Alexandre Dumas. For anyone drawn to the great untranslated traditions of European popular fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Espresso Publishing House","offers":[{"title":"Perfect Bound","offer_id":67535099035952,"sku":"9781997077008","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/www.thegreatbritishbookshop.co.uk\/products\/the-blind-woman-of-sorrento","provider":"The Great British Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}