The Lost Daughter

Description

Leda, a middle-aged divorcee, is alone for the first time in years when her daughters leave home to live with their father. Her initial, unexpected sense of liberty turns quickly to ferocious introspection following a seemingly trivial occurrence. Ferrante's language is as fierce and finely tuned as ever - she treats her theme with an intense, candid tenacity. A complex, controlled and piercing meditation on motherhood and womanhood.

Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), and the four novels known as the Neapolitan Quartet (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child) which were published by Europa Editions between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018. Ferrante is also the author of Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey (Europa, 2016), a children's picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night (Europa, 2016), and a collection of personal essays illustrated by Andrea Ucini entitled Incidental Inventions (Europa, 2019). The Lost Daughter will be made into a feature film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman. Her most recent novel is The Lying Life of Adults (Europa, 2020). Ann Goldstein is one of the most accomplished translators from the Italian working today. Best known for her translations of Elena Ferrante's oeuvre, she has also translated novels by Primo Levi, Pierpaolo Pasolini, Alessandro Baricco and other classic and contemporary Italian writers.

"Ferrante's novels are tactile and sensual, visceral and dizzying." * The Guardian * "It's Leda's voice that's hypnotic, and it's the writing that makes it that way. Ferrante can do a woman's interior dialogue like no one else, with a ferocity that is shockingly honest, unnervingly blunt" * Booklist * "Ferrante's gift for psychological horror renders it immediate and visceral" * The New Yorker * "Ferrante is a hypnotist." * The Spectator * "[Ferrante] describes the female experience so intimately and so vividly that the reader feels like she could (and should) know the writer personally." * New York Magazine * "A raw, gritty and gripping meditation of the difficulties of motherhood." * The Observer * "An absorbingly shaped psychological drama, built around a single traumatising event from which the action metastasises." * The Guardian * "Subtly daring." * The Financial Times * "Entirely gripping..... a literary film with a literary script." * The Spectator * "Sadness is lanced through the heart of Gyllenhaal's film, which she both adapted and directed, but it's rich and luxurious in its texture." * The Independent * "Adapted from Elena Ferrante's novel of the same name, The Lost Daughter is a heady exercise in restraint." * NME *