The Story of the Lost Child concludes the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila, who first met amid the shambles of postwar Italy. In this book, life’s great discoveries have been made; its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women’s friendship remains the gravitational center of their lives.
Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. But now, she has returned to Naples to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood. Yet, somehow, this proximity to a world she has always rejected only brings her role as unacknowledged leader of that world into relief.
Publisher: Europa Editions (UK) Ltd
ISBN: 9781787702691
Number of pages: 400
Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
"Elena Ferrante’s novels have a driving and unconventional narrative power that has gripped readers across a wide cultural range...the last of the quartet The Story of the Lost Child, which has just been longlisted for the Man Booker International prize, is the best." - Margaret Drabble, The Guardian
"This final book in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet brings a phenomenal literary enterprise to an arresting conclusion." - The Sunday Times
"A tribute to feminism and female friendship in mid-20th-century Naples." - The Economist
"The final installation of her Neapolitan quartet, was every bit as sinister and compelling as its predecessors, a vivid and haunting portrait of female friendship that confirms Ferrante as one of the masters of her craft." - Alex Preston, The Guardian
"The first work worthy of the Nobel prize to have come out of Italy for many decades." - The Observer
The Neapolitan novels absorbed me from the very first book, and rarely have I been so enchanted by a cast of characters. Ferrante's writing is brutal, honest and full of depth, allowing the reader to really fall... More
Elena Ferrante has written a consistently great story line which keeps you interested and makes you want to keep reading - which is what a real book is all about! I love it. It's real life brought together in an... More
The fourth and final Naepolitan novel only disappoints in that, that it is the final one. Not only does Ferrante somehow manage to bring together all that she has been building over the span of the three previous... More
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