The Story of the Lost Child: A Novel (Neapolitan Novels, 4) (Neapolitan Quartet, 4) - Softcover

"Her four-novel Neapolitan story is an epic masterpiece, a Künstlerroman of sustained passion and fury... Ferrante is a subtle subversive; the domestic, in her brilliant books, is a time bomb that ticks too loudly to ignore." --TIME's 100 Most Influential People

"I say this with more confidence than I have felt during 15 years of book reviewing: the Neapolitan novels are extraordinary." --The Sunday Times

"The Story of the Lost Child does not offer a comfortable end to the series, but it confirms Ferrante once again as one of contemporary fiction's most compelling voices." --The Telegraph

"From a literary perspective, Ms Ferrante's approach is masterly. She uses the melodramatic tropes of soap opera to tell a cracking good story, all the while smuggling in piercing observations, like a file baked in a cake." --The Economist

"...the Neapolitan quartet is not just a triumph of psychological insight, social observation or storytelling magic. It is the first work worthy of the Nobel prize to have come out of Italy for many decades." --The Observer

"Perhaps her quartet should be seen as one of the first great works of post-authorial literature." --The Atlantic

"Ferrante's prose is compellingly accurate at the molecular level of emotion where love and friendship shade into jealousy, manipulation and Schadenfreude, but it's this narrative organisation that fascinates." --The Spectator

"The dark heart of friendship has rarely been anatomised in more pitiless detail." --The Evening Standard

"Written in direct and insistent prose, Ferrante's novel is full of drama: fighting, blood, screaming and political corruption are all par for the course. But it is Elena's extraordinary plumbing of identity that ensures that this book - and its predecessors - leave such an indelible impression." --The Daily Mail

"Ferrante's writing seems to say something that hasn't been said before - it isn't easy to specify what this is - in a way so compelling its readers forget where they are, abandon friends and disdain sleep. It would be enough to have books in which we recognise the truth of women's lives in all its darkness, but the Neapolitan quartet also has an almost deranging narrative pleasure, delivered in a style that's more of an admission that the author cares too much about the truth to bother with style." --London Review of Books

"A portrait of the dynamic of a friendship has mutated into a weightier, more uncanny exploration of the antipathy of love, of our compulsion to create one another, over and over again." --The Guardian

"No other writer, as far as I can see, has ever truly exploited this rich and difficult subject to such a degree as Ferrante. And no other writer has come as deliciously close to fully understanding and bringing to life what for young girls is the formative relationship of our lives." --Open Democracy

"If you only read four books this year, then make it these." --Stylist

"Ferrante's raw, thrillingly unmediated depictions feel alarmingly unique... You shouldn''t read this book if you have yet to read Ferrante. But read her you must." --The Metro

"It only takes a few chapters to be hooked by the story of Elena, the hyper-intelligent and observant writer who narrates the books, and her childhood friend Lila, equally intelligent but possessed of a natural wildness." --The Express

"Intense, intimate and full of enraged emotional analysis, there's a marvellous sense of urgency and drama as each crisis unfolds." -- The Express

"Part social tapestry, part feminist Bildungsroman, this tetralogy shines above all because of its vibrant, unflinching study of friendship." --Financial Times

"In her celebrated Neapolitan novels, Ferrante creates an enduring portrait of a 'splendid and shadowy' female friendship." --BBC Culture's 10 Books to Read in September

"Once again, Ferrante has produced a novel that compels you to keep reading, helped along by the many short chapters, the strong plotting and the lengthy, comma-laden sentences which reflect the frantic activity, sweeping the reader along." --Tony's Reading List

"For those who have read all her books, the Neapolitan novels can resemble a magic trick: watch the invisible author (Ferrante's determination to remain hidden is by now notorious) crack open one of her small, dark, violent stories, and out comes a sprawling, teeming world reminiscent of a nineteenth-century novel, a span of six decades within which ten families collide against the sociopolitical panorama of post-war Italy." --Times Literary Supplement

"The fourth volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet brings her ambitious project to a triumphant, satisfying, baffling and unsettling conclusion, coming full circle with an epilogue called "Restitution". But we find no such thing. Nothing is restored: we battle on, through old age, to the end. There is no peace, no reconciliation, no end to the power struggles and convulsions of sex and politics. These are volcanic novels." --Margaret Drabble in New Statesman

"[W]hat Ferrante has achieved is a perfect marriage of immense storytelling with chillingly effective literary artistry." --The Independent

"Elena's fury also brings to mind how often women get rape threats for writing about sex or race or anything potentially contentious on the internet, in the way she is reduced to her sexuality alone when she tries to enter the world of ideas - a male sphere. It is no surprise these books resonate so deeply." --Broadly

"It is Lila, angry wild child grown into doomed beauty and self-destructive seer, a factory worker, later a computer expert, and eventually a bereaved mother, who steers this narrative. Her experiences resonate in the way Jean Rhys's characters claw at the heart." --Irish Times

"The Neapolitan Novels, taken together as one long epic that stretches from childhood to old age, are so smart about the darker currents of female friendships, the discrepancies between sexual desire and sexual politics, the high cost of a class migration like Elena's, and the ultimate 'velocity with which life [is] consumed.'" --NPR's Fresh Air

"Covering childhood, sex, motherhood, dreams and betrayals, they're a saga of feminism, friendship and political upheaval, set against the changing face of Italy." --The Irish Mail

Elena Ferrante was born in Naples. She is the author of "The Days of Abandonment "(Europa, 2005), "Troubling Love "(Europa, 2007), and "The Lost Daughter "(Europa, 2009). Her Neapolitan novels include "My Brilliant Friend," "The Story of a New Name," "Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay," and the fourth and final book in the series, "The Story of the Lost Child."