The famous autobiographical novel by an Italian critic and writer that looks back on her fascist upbringing, her gradual revulsion for it that culminated in a spell in Dachau, from which she escaped, only to be paralysed from the waist down (aged nineteen) when trying to dig survivors from rubble in the bombing of Mainz.

This dazzling novel (and last year’s winner of the Prix Goncourt) consists of vignettes of meetings in the Corridors of Power that led to the slide into war in 1939: German industrialists with Hitler; the Austrian Chancellor outmanoueuvred at the Berghof; Churchill and Chamberlain delayed at lunch by Ribbentrop as German tanks rolled over the border into Austria. Breathtaking for all its slimness.