Natalia Ginzburg begins A Family Lexicon with an unusual disclaimer: The places, events and people are all real. I have invented nothing. Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy everything thus invented. In A Family Lexicon fiction is under the control of fact, and the result is a novel that recreates the small world of a family enduring some of the most difficult years of the twentieth century-spanning the period from the rise of Mussolini through World War II, in which Ginzburg’s husband fought for the resistance and was killed by the Nazis-with passionate objectivity. Every family has its store of phrases and sayings by which it maintains its sense both of what it means to be a family and of what sets it apart as one particular family. This lexicon, these shared understandings, these stories, not by any means always to be relied on and sometimes not a little ridiculous, lie at the heart of a great novel about family and history.