The Story of the Lost Child

2015, pp. 464, Paperback
ISBN: 9781609452865
Translated by: Ann Goldstein
Region: Italy

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The book

The fourth and final Neapolitan novel

“Nothing quite like this has ever been published before,” proclaimed The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two women with unmatched honesty and brilliance.

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.

The author

Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), and the four novels 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) which were published by Europa Editions between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018. Ferrante is also the author of Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (Europa, 2016), a children’s picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night (Europa, 2016), and a collection of personal essays illustrated by Andrea Ucini entitled Incidental Inventions (Europa, 2019). The Lost Daughter will be made into a feature film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman. Her most recent novel is The Lying Life of Adults (Europa, 2020). In the Margins, a collection of original essays on reading and writing, was published by Europa in 2022.