From The New Yorker

In this brutally frank novel of maternal ambivalence, the narrator, a forty-seven-year-old divorcée summering alone on the Ionian coast, becomes obsessed with a beautiful young mother who seems ill at ease with her husband’s rowdy, slightly menacing Neapolitan clan. When this woman’s daughter loses her doll, the older woman commits a small crime that she can’t explain even to herself. Although much of the drama takes place in her head, Ferrante’s gift for psychological horror renders it immediate and visceral, as when the narrator recalls the "animal opacity" with which she first longed for a child, before she was devoured by pregnancy.
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Review

Praise for The Lost Daughter

"Elena Ferrante will blow you away."
—Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones

"The Lost Daughter is a resounding success...It is delicate yet daring, precise yet evanescent: it hurts like a cut, and cures like balm."
—La Repubblica

"The Lost Daughter is a novel about the female condition: the conflicts that can emerge in the sphere of marriage, the extinction of love and passion, the difficult relationships with children, which both obstruct and assist the free expression of one's feelings and the growth towards maturity."
—La Stampa

"Ferrante can do a woman's interior dialogue like no one else, with a ferocity that is shockingly honest, unnervingly blunt."
—Booklist

"Ferrante has blown the lid off tempestuous parent-child relations."
—The Seattle Times

"So refined, almost translucent, that it seems about to float away. In the end this piercing novel is not so easily dislodged from the memory."
—The Boston Globe

"Ferrante's prose is stunningly candid, direct and unforgettable. From simple elements, she builds a powerful tale of hope and regret."
—Publishers Weekly

Praise for Elena Ferrante

“Elena Ferrante’s decision to remain biographically unavailable is her greatest gift to readers, and maybe her boldest creative gesture.”
—David Kurnick, Public Books

“Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it.”
—Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe

“Ferrante has written about female identity with a heft and sharpness unmatched by anyone since Doris Lessing.”
—Elizabeth Lowry, The Wall Street Journal

“Ferrante has become Italy’s best known writer. In our era of social media accessibility, shameless self-promotion, and hot young celebrity culture, this is nothing short of astounding.”
—Gina Frangello, Electric Literature

“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.”
—Joanna Biggs, The London Review of Books

“To disagree over the quality of a Ferrante passage is often to run up against what you cannot answer or digest.”
—Jedediah Purdy, The Los Angeles Review of Books

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