Description: When Leda's daughters leave home to be with their father, she decides to take a trip to a small coastal town in Italy, but soon after she arrives memories from her unsettled past come back to haunt her.
Brief description:
Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), and The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), now a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, and Paul Mescal. She is also the author of Incidental Inventions (Europa, 2019), illustrated by Andrea Ucini, Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey (Europa, 2016) and a children's picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night (Europa, 2016). The four volumes known as the "Neapolitan quartet" (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child) were published by Europa Editions in English between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018. Ferrante's most recent novel, the New York Times bestselling The Lying Life of Adults, was published in 2020 by Europa Editions.
Review Quotes:
Praise for The Lost Daughter
"Elena Ferrante will blow you away."--Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones
"Ferrante can do a woman's interior dialogue like no one else, with a ferocity that is shockingly honest, unnervingly blunt."--Booklist
"Ferrante has blown the lid off tempestuous parent-child relations."--The Seattle Times
"So refined, almost translucent, that it seems about to float away. In the end this piercing novel is not so easily dislodged from the memory."--The Boston Globe
"Ferrante's prose is stunningly candid, direct and unforgettable. From simple elements, she builds a powerful tale of hope and regret."--Publishers Weekly
"The Lost Daughter is a resounding success...It is delicate yet daring, precise yet evanescent: it hurts like a cut, and cures like balm."--La Repubblica
"The Lost Daughter is a novel about the female condition: the conflicts that can emerge in the sphere of marriage, the extinction of love and passion, the difficult relationships with children, which both obstruct and assist the free expression of one's feelings and the growth towards maturity."--La Stampa
Praise for Elena Ferrante
"Elena Ferrante's decision to remain biographically unavailable is her greatest gift to readers, and maybe her boldest creative gesture."--David Kurnick, Public Books
"Everyone should read anything with Ferrante's name on it."--Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe
"Ferrante has written about female identity with a heft and sharpness unmatched by anyone since Doris Lessing."--Elizabeth Lowry, The Wall Street Journal
"Ferrante has become Italy's best known writer. In our era of social media accessibility, shameless self-promotion, and hot young celebrity culture, this is nothing short of astounding."--Gina Frangello, Electric Literature
"Ferrante's writing seems to say something that hasn't been said before--it isn't easy to specify what this is--in a way so compelling its readers forget where they are, abandon friends and disdain sleep."--Joanna Biggs, The London Review of Books
"To disagree over the quality of a Ferrante passage is often to run up against what you cannot answer or digest."--Jedediah Purdy, The Los Angeles Review of Books