This final book in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet brings a phenomenal literary enterprise to an arresting conclusion. In it the story of a sometimes supportive, sometimes rivalrous female friendship, begun in childhood amid a crime-ridden locality of 1950s Naples, continues from the 1970s to the present day. Like the preceding volumes, it is a masterpiece of immersion (in the complexities of its central figures and in Italian family, social and political life). Powerfully featuring abduction, murder, suicide, marital crises and fraught love affairs, its narrative is a masterpiece of casual-seeming craftsmanship.
