The Days of Abandonment

(Paperback)

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'Stunning... the raging, torrential voice of the author is something rare.' - The New York Times

THE BREAK-OUT NOVEL BY THE INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF MY BRILLIANT FRIEND

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.

'Ferrante puts hammer to flesh and invites her reader to penetrate the page.' - Financial Times
'Extraordinary.' - The London Review of Books

Reviews

'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

Author Bio

Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, The Lost Daughter, and the fourvolumes of the Neapolitan Quartet (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and ThoseWho Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child), published by Europa Editions between 2012 and 2015. She isalso the author of a children's picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night, and a work ofnon-fiction, Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey. Incidental Inventions, her collected Guardian columns, werepublished in 2019.

Ann Goldstein is one of the most accomplished translators from the Italian working today. Best knownfor her translations of Elena Ferrante's oeuvre, she has also brought to Anglo-Saxon readers novels byPrimo Levi, Pierpaolo Pasolini, Alessandro Baricco and other classic and contemporary Italian writers.