Inferno

HarperCollins is proud to present our range of timeless literary classics. All hope abandon, ye who enter in! Just before dawn on Good Friday, 1300, the gates of Hell swing open. Lost in a dark forest, the poet Dante stumbles across the ghost of Virgil who guides him on a long journey home through the abyss. Together, they meet the sinners of the past: lustful, gluttonous, wrathful, heretic, and violent, all the way to the worst of the worst in the freezing pit below. Inferno is the first part of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, one of the greatest epic poems ever written, and the pre-eminent work of Italian literature. Posing eternal questions of human nature and divine justice, Inferno has inspired artists and thinkers for hundreds of years; its torments and horrors giving shape to our modern image of Hell itself.

Durante degli Alighieri, or Dante (c. 1265-1321), was one of the major Italian poets of the Middle Ages and is referred to as the father of the Italian language. His 'Divine Comedy' is widely considered to be the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature.