OVER 14M OF THE NEAPOLITAN QUARTET SOLD WORLDWIDE Nothing quite like this has ever been
published before."- The Guardian "This is high stakes subversive literature."- The Daily
Telegraph "With the publication of her Neapolitan Novels (Ferrante) has established herself
as the foremost writer in Italy-and the world."- The Sunday Times "An unconditional
masterpiece . . . I was totally enthralled."-Jhumpa Lahiri "An extraordinary epic."-Michiko
Kakutani The New York Times "To the uninitiated Elena Ferrante is best described as Balzac
meets The Sopranos and rewrites feminist theory."- The Times "Ferrante's writing seems to
say something that hasn't been said before in a way so compelling its readers forget where
they are abandon friends and disdain sleep."- London Review of Books "Stunning. An intense
forensic exploration of friendship."- The Times Literary Supplement 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.
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.
