Lost Daughter

From the author of My Brilliant Friend

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 embarassed 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 apparently 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 standalone novel The Lost Daughter candidly explores the conflicting emotions that tie us to our children.


"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