An academic translator of literature goes to a beach town in Naples for vacation after her grown daughters have moved to Canada to live with their father. She becomes enamored of a Neapolitan family, especially a young mother wife of a fierce old Godfather like man and her daughter, who loses a doll, which the narrator finds and keeps for reasons she cannot explain. A ruminative and thoughtful lyric story about the divide between self and motherhood, sacrifice, and love. The Lost Daughter is an intriguing, if not quite enthralling, read. Its prose is direct and its story simple, but beneath this placid surface is a dark psychological undercurrent that suffuses the story with a disorienting and disturbing uncanniness.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
Potential content warnings include themes of abandonment, maternal ambivalence, psychological trauma, and emotional distress.
From The Publisher:
"Elena Ferrante will blow you away."-Alice Sebold
Leda is a middle-aged divorcée 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, seemingly 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.
Following the extraordinary success of The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante's new novel explores the conflicting emotions that tie us to our children. This candid fiction represents her most compelling and perceptive meditation on womanhood and motherhood thus far.
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