num_pages: 418
description: In this third Neapolitan novel Elena and Lila the two girls whom readers first met in My Brilliant Friend have become women. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her abusive husband and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood earned her college degree and published a successful novel all of which have opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons. Both women have pushed against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery ignorance and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up during the nineteen-seventies. Yet they are still very much bound to each other by a strong unbreakable bond.
language: English
title: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
publisher: Europa Editions