“Nothing quite like this has ever been published before”—

 The Guardian newspaper about the Neapolitan Novels in 2014.

 Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third book in the series, was an international best seller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Its author was dubbed “one of the great novelists of our time” by the New York Times Book Review. This fourth and final installment in the series raises the bar even higher and indeed confirms Elena Ferrante as one of the world’s best living storytellers.

Ferrante’s story is even more piquant than that of Harper Lee; nobody knows precisely who she is. The reclusive author has refused to promote her books, will provide only written answers to questions from journalists, won’t accept awards or attend writer’s conferences. Her books, she argues, should speak for themselves.


Here is the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery uncontainable Lila. In this book, both are adults; life’s great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women’s friendship, examined in its every detail over the course of four books, remains the gravitational center of their lives.

Both women once 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. But now, she has returned to Naples to be with the man she has always loved.

Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood. Yet somehow this proximity to a world she has always rejected only brings her role as unacknowledged leader of that world 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, this story of a lifelong friendship is told with unmatched honesty. Lila and Elena clash, drift apart, reconcile, and clash again, in the process revealing new facets of their friendship.

The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and, like Elena and Lila themselves, every return will bring with it new discoveries.

Four starred reviews for Book 3 in the series
14 best-of-the-year appearances for Book 3

PEN World Voices Festival: THE PASSION OF ELENA FERRANTE

Presented as part of The Literary Mews - a festival within the PEN World Voices Festival

Award-winning translator Ann Goldstein (The New Yorker) and NYU professor Rebecca Falkoff will discuss the anonymous Italian author, whose devastatingly honest novels—particularly the epic Neapolitan tetralogy—have moved readers to a rare and visceral passion. Their dialogue will reflect upon the powerful emotions narrated and elicited by the novels. Ann Goldstein will speak about her work as a translator, and about the ways in which the novels foreground translation through references to dialect. Rebecca Falkoff will talk about the cultural context of Ferrante's work, and the different reception of the Neapolitan novels in Italy and the United States.
Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò
New York University


 “She shuns publicity and her identity is a mystery. Yet, as the last in her acclaimed series of novels about two friends in Naples is published, Elena Ferrante’s reputation is soaring, with Zadie Smith, James Wood and Jhumpa Lahiri among her fans.”—
Meghan O’Rourke on a literary mystery

 In a 2003 written interview, Ferrante said, “The true reader, I think, searches not for the brittle face of the author in flesh and blood” but instead for “the naked physiognomy that remains in every effective word”.


 Whoever Ferrante is, in the novel she is free to invent, to fabricate, to play, to revisit old wounds, to be less than beautiful.

This is what writing can do: create a space for the savage within, for the contradictory and the wild, and make it real. There may be no consolation except the art itself, but what a pleasure for those of us who get to read it. I would not want to forget what Ferrante herself so eloquently stated in one of her letters: the mystery of literature is in some ways its difference from the person who wrote it, the unfathomable effacement of self that leads to its creation. 




Ferrante’s elegant prose style and her almost confessional approach to storytelling, have made her a cult favorite; the line to acquire one of 200 advance copies of “The Story of the Lost Child” from her publishers, Europa, at BookExpo last month rivaled those for, say, Gloria Steinem — and many went away disappointed.

A List of Books are arriving in stores this summer that are worthy of a good read.—

6 Unsung Novels By Suzanne McGee, The Fiscal Times

TheReview Accommodates Many Voices: If you’re a book lover of thrillers, you know that suspense novels can heat things up during the summer, so get ready— the release schedules for some of the world’s best thriller writers.

“If life is a #movie most people would consider themselves the #star of their own feature.”— http://t.co/FQPEI4X3A7

— Make A Difference! (@Poboyonline) May 24, 2015

Thanks for Reading! ;-)