num_pages: 473
description: Nothing quite like this has ever been published before proclaimed The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. 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.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.The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again and each return will bring with it new revelations.
language: English
title: The Story of the Lost Child
publisher: Europa Editions