The Story of the Lost Child

(Paperback)

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The Story of the Lost Child is the concluding volume in the dazzling saga of two women- the brilliant, bookish Elena, and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both are now adults, with husbands, lovers, aging parents, and children. Their friendship has been the gravitational center of their lives. Both women fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up-a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. In this final novel she has returned to Naples, drawn back as if responding to the city's obscure magnetism. Lila, on the other hand, could never free herself from the city of her birth. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect the neighborhood. Proximity to the world she has always rejected only brings her role as its unacknowledged leader into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable.

The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.

Reviews

"Elena Ferrantes 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 Ferrantes 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 *

Author Bio

Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), and the international best-selling Neapolitan Quartet. She is also the author of Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey; a children's picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night, and, most recently, a collection of essays entitled Incidental Inventions (Europa, 2019).

Ann Goldstein is one of the most accomplished translators from the Italian working today. Best known for her translations of Elena Ferrante's oeuvre, she has also translated novels by Primo Levi, Pierpaolo Pasolini and many more.