The stories in For Solo Voice, Susanna Tamaro's first book to be published
in English, explore the historical and emotional dramas and traumas which
lie beneath the consciousness and threaten to erupt into everyday life. She
exposes with analytical clarity spectres of our past that abide with us as
individuals and as a society, disfiguring our common humanity.

In 'Monday
Again' the cruelty meted out to a young girl is compounded by a narrative
voice which refuses to understand what it reports. In 'Love' a girl
enslaved by gypsies as a beggar, treated as little better than a thief and
prostitute, understands her world in terms of the cinema posters that
surround her. 'A Childhood' chronicles a boy's life, his middle-class
family's disintegration, his irresistible descent into violence, perversion
and schizophrenia. 'Beneath the Snow' and the title story 'For Solo Voice'
move from childhood to adult experience which the dark workings of the past
continue to haunt. In 'Beneath the Snow' a girl, forced to surrender her
illegitimate baby, becomes a successful professional whose body mourns in a
series of phantom pregnancies, and who at last succumbs to the cancer of
the past. 'For Solo Voice' offers a kaleidoscope of personal and historical
madness as past wrongs -- Nazi and Fascist killings -- bind the generations
in an inescapable cycle of despair. Tamaro's narrative power is
devastating: in her uncompromised clarity and candour lies her compassion.