It is the late 1930s and Italy's Fascist government has imposed its infamous race laws. In Rome the young professor he is a Jew in love with the beautiful and enigmatic Sonia. She is everything that he is not: privileged, Catholic, and the daughter of prominent parents who enthusiastically support Benito Mussolini. Carpi ultimately wins Sonia's affections but the price is great. In order to enter her jealously guarded circle of family and friends, he must deny his origins. Her world has no use for him and to be a part of it he will ultimately be forced to accept humiliating and painful compromises. Winner of the Moravia Prize for fiction, The Jewish Husband is a bittersweet story of passion and hatred, cruelty and oppression. It is an account of a country and a time about which too little has been written, and the terrible consequences of that period's race laws.

Above all, however, it is a tender love story set at a time in which the world and its inhabitants appeared to have lost their ability to show tenderness. 'From her earliest novels, Levi's supple, calm and poised language - a pristine and faultless language - has been her most abiding characteristic and her greatest strength. ' Leggere Donna 'Lia Levi relates an exemplary tale of subsidence and redemption, of small lives engulfed in the vortex of history.' Il Messaggero 'Levi's writing, as it nears the central drama, begins to vibrate, and as it does so the story itself vibrates, enveloping the reader and filling him with emotion.' Corriere della Sera.