The Lost Daughter

Description

From the international bestselling author of MY BRILLIANT FRIEND Leda is devoted to her work as an English teacher and to her two children. When her daughters leave home to be with their father in Canada, Leda anticipates a period of loneliness and longing. Instead, slightly embarrassed by the sensation, she feels liberated, as if her life has become lighter, easier. She decides to take a holiday by the sea, in a small coastal town in southern Italy. But after a few days of calm and quiet, things begin to take a menacing turn. Leda encounters a family whose brash presence proves unsettling, at times even threatening. When a small, apparently meaningless, event occurs, Leda is overwhelmed by memories of the difficult and unconventional choices she made as a mother and their consequences for herself and her family. The seemingly serene tale of a woman's pleasant rediscovery of herself soon becomes the story of a ferocious confrontation with an unsettled past. The Lost Daughter is a compelling and perceptive meditation on womanhood and motherhood, exploring the conflicting emotions that tie us to our children.

Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008) and the four volumes of 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), published by Europa Editions between 2012 and 2015. She is also the author of a children's picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night, and a work of non-fiction, Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey. Incidental Inventions, her collected Guardian columns, was published in 2019.

"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 *