Half a century after Cesare Pavese's tragic death, his plainspoken yet lyrical novels retain their richness and appeal. Included in this volume are four of his finest books. Devil in the Hills tells the story of three young men who encounter tragedy in the Italian countryside. In Among Women Only a fashion designer finds herself caught up in an eerie dance of sex and death. Pavese's masterpiece, The House in the Hills, examines the life of a schoolteacher whose brief involvement with the Resistance compels him to become a fugitive. The Beach is a bittersweet comic tale about romance, shifting allegiances, and unfounded suspicions in a seaside resort.

"There is only one pleasure, that of being alive. All the rest is misery," wrote Cesare Pavese, whose short, intense life spanned the ordeals of fascism and World War II to witness the beginnings of Italy's postwar prosperity. Searchingly alert to nuances of speech, feeling, and atmosphere, and remarkably varied, his novels offer a panoramic vision, at once sensual and finely considered, of a time of tumultuous change. This volume presents readers with Pavese's major works. "The Beach" is a wry summertime comedy of sexual and romantic misunderstandings, while "The House on the Hill" is an extraordinary novel of war in which a teacher flees through a countryside that is both beautiful and convulsed with terror. "Among Women Only" tells of a fashion designer who enters the affluent world she has always dreamed of, only to find herself caught up in an eerie dance of destruction, and "The Devil in the Hills" is an engaging road novel about three young men roaming the hills in high summer who stumble on mysteries of love and death.

The beach — The house on the hill — Among women only - The devil in the hills.