A woman’s world turns unrecognisable in the aftermath her husband abandoning her in this visceral, dark and breathlessly magnetic novella from the author of the Neapolitan Quartet.
Rarely have the foundations upon which our ideas of motherhood and womanhood rest been so candidly questioned. This compelling novel tells the story of one woman's headlong descent into what she calls an "absence of sense" after being abandoned by her husband.
Olga's "days of abandonment" become a desperate, dangerous freefall into the darkest places of the soul as she roams the empty streets of a city that she has never learned to love. When she finds herself trapped inside the four walls of her apartment in the middle of a summer heat wave, Olga is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal again.
Publisher: Europa Editions (UK) Ltd
ISBN: 9781787702066
Number of pages: 192
Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
"Elena Ferrante is a Hypnotist." - The Spectator
"This is sharp, vicious, dark and it completely took me aback." - Foyles
"Visceral, dizzying, terrifying - this slim book does more in 192 pages than most in double that." - Verso's Best Books of 2015
“Ferrante puts hammer to flesh and invites her reader to penetrate the page.” - Financial Times
“Extraordinary.” - The London Review of Books
“Elena Ferrante will blow you away.” - Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones
“Her novels are intensely, violently personal, and because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader.” - James Wood, The New Yorker
“Stunning… the raging, torrential voice of the author is something rare.” - The New York Times
Initially the main character didn’t endear herself to me and I found her very self absorbed although that was probably due to the power of the author’s narrative. However as the story developed, she regained her... More
This book is a female rage novel written before ‘female rage novels’ were such a trend. The story follows Olga, a woman in her late thirties who descends into emptiness and despair when her husband suddenly leaves her... More
This is not the kind of book I would necessarily generally pick up, but I really enjoyed it and it certainly pushed me outside my comfort zone. It tells the powerful story of a woman who is left by her husband (it... More
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