Zeno’s Conscience

A marvel of psychological insight from one of the most important Italian literary figures of the twentieth centuryThis enormously engaging, strange novel is both an engrossing saga of a family and a hilarious account of addiction and failure as its helpless hero, notionally undergoing psychiatric help, manages spectacularly to fail to give up smoking, run his business or make sense of his private life.A hymn to self-delusion and procrastination, Zeno’s Conscience has provoked enormous affection in its readers both in Italian and English since its first publication in the 1920s.

Italo Svevo (1861-1928) lived most of his life in Trieste, now part of Italy, but then a port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Zeno’s Conscience is his greatest work, seen by James Joyce as one of the century’s handful of masterpieces. His other novels include As a Man Grows Older and A Life.