In the Library
The Betrothed
Alessandro Manzoni, 1827
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 12 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 37
- Length
- Length 165k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
That branch of the Lake of Como, which turns toward the south between two unbroken chains of mountains
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Les Misérables does the same thing, but through Valjean's flight from a relentless pursuer instead of two lovers kept apart by one cowardly threat.
£1.99
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace does the same thing, but widens the lens from one village to a whole nation swept up in history and faith.
£1.99
Ivanhoe
Sir Walter Scott
Ivanhoe does the same thing, but in Scott's Norman England, the very novel Manzoni read before inventing his own historical romance.
£1.99
About the book
Two hired men step out from behind a bend in the road and tell the village priest, quietly, that the wedding he means to perform tomorrow will not take place, not tomorrow, not ever. That is the whole disaster in miniature: one frightened man deciding his own safety matters more than two people's happiness, and a whole world rearranging itself around his fear. Renzo and Lucia, torn apart because a lord named Don Rodrigo wants her for himself, spend their engagement surviving famine riots, a feared bandit's sudden conversion, and the Milan plague of 1630, which Manzoni renders so exactly that a mother laying her own dead child on the cart with her own hands has never left Italian memory. He rewrote the whole book a second time in the Tuscan of the Arno, so a country that did not yet exist could read, in one shared language, about two people who simply would not stop waiting for each other. That patience, plain and stubborn and entirely unglamorous, is the real love story here.