Published in 1880, one year before Verga's influential novel The Malavoglias, Life in the Country first marked his stylistic shift towards the verismo school of Italian realism. The collection's centrepiece, `Rustic Honour' (`Cavalleria rusticana') - which was famously adapted into a play by the author before becoming an opera by Mascagni - tells the tale of Turiddu, a poor young man who returns from military service and finds himself embroiled in adultery and a feud with a rival. Also including the well-known stories `She-Wolf' and `Foxfur', A Life in the Country captures, in an objective, non-judgemental prose, the difficult conditions and personal struggles of the peasant class in his native Sicily at the turn of the twentieth century.

Novel