A bit of welcome relief from the testosterone-fuelled big beastery came in the form of The Story of the Lost Child, the final instalment of Elena Ferrante’s wildly popular quartet of Neapolitan novels. “This is not the Italy of buxom matrons cheerfully rolling out pasta,” wrote Melissa Katsoulis in the Times. “This is a grimy place of motorways, building sites and smelly bins ... no foreign reader will see Italy in the same way again.” For Rachel Cusk, in the New York Times, Ferrante “adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience”, with her preoccupations being “the inherent radicalism of modern female identity; the struggles of the female artist … with her biological and social destiny as a woman.”
