Laura Waddell, Digital Marketing Executive at Freight Books
The most significant reading experience I’ve had in 2015 has been Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan series translated by Ann Goldstein, the last of which, The Story of the Lost Child (Europa Editions), was published in English in September. Ferrante depicts what it is to be a working class woman from a Neopolitan village in this story spanning the lifetime of two friends. Although these parallel lives take different paths, Lenu and Lila are inescapably impacted by the class and gender situation of their births throughout, in ways both obvious and eye-openingly subtle. The story of the two friends is set to the backdrop of violent Italian politics in the mid twentieth century. Essentially, the novels are an exploration of pervasive systems of power told through the domestic, romantic and working lives of two characters who utterly got under my skin. Having finished the series I’m still grieving it being over.
