Vintage Classics: Our Ancestors

Viscount Medardo is bisected by a Turkish cannonball on the plains of Bohemia; Baron Cosimo, at the age of twelve, retires to the trees for the rest of his days; Charlemagne''s knight, Agiluf, is an empty suit of armour. These three vivid images are the points of departure for Calvino''s classic triptych of moral tales, now published in one volume and all displaying the exuberant talent of a master storyteller. ''The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists'' The Times ''Calvino''s refusal to be glum set him apart from other modernists. His marvellous Fifties trilogy, Our Ancestors, brought us allegorical fables about a cloven viscount, a non-existent knight and a baron who swings from the trees'' Guardian