Elias Portolu

He returned from prison to find his brother's bride. Then he made the mistake of falling in love.

Grazia Deledda's breakthrough novel is a story of forbidden desire, family duty, and the slow, agonizing punishment of a conscience that cannot forgive itself.

Elias Portolu has served his time in prison and returns to his family's sheep farm in rural Sardinia, hoping to rebuild his life. His brother Mattia is engaged to be married to a beautiful young woman named Maddalena. But Elias and Maddalena fall desperately in love. They commit a sin that cannot be hidden from God, even if the village never learns the truth. Tortured by guilt, Elias retreats into religious devotion, becoming a servant of the Church in a desperate attempt to atone. But the past does not release him. And the woman he loves is never far away.

This is Deledda at her most psychologically penetrating: a novel about the collision between passion and piety, between what the body wants and what the soul demands. Elias Portolu established Deledda as a major voice in Italian literature and remains one of her most powerful works.

• Deledda's first major critical and popular success, published in 1903

• A landmark of the verismo (realist) movement in Italian literature

• Explores themes of guilt, redemption, forbidden love, and the harsh moral codes of rural Sardinia

Available in multiple formats:

• Paperback & Hardcover: Beautifully designed print editions presenting the complete, unabridged text made to last.

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• Audiobook: Professionally narrated, complete and unabridged, available on all major audiobook platforms.

A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that the hardest prison to escape is the one inside your own head.

About the Author

Grazia Deledda (1871–1936) was an Italian novelist and poet, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926, only the second woman (after Selma Lagerlöf) to receive the honor. Born in Nuoro, Sardinia, into a middle-class family, she was largely self-taught, forbidden from attending university because of her gender. She began writing stories at thirteen and published her first novel at seventeen. Elias Portolu (1903) was her first truly mature work, moving beyond the sentimental romance of her earliest novels into the psychological realism that would define her best writing. The novel drew praise from Italian critics and helped establish her reputation beyond Sardinia. Her other major works include Ashes (1904), Reeds in the Wind (1913), The Mother (1920), and Cosima(1937, posthumous). She died in Rome in 1936. Her Nobel Prize citation praised her “idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general.”