Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Neapolitan Novels 3)
Elena Ferrante, 2013 (trans. 2014)
Europa Editions
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781609452339
Summary
Since the publication of My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan novels, Elena Ferrante’s fame as one of our most compelling, insightful, and stylish contemporary authors has grown enormously. She has gained admirers among authors and critics. But her most resounding success has undoubtedly been with readers, who have discovered in Ferrante a writer who speaks with great power and beauty of the mysteries of belonging, human relationships, love, family, and friendship.
The incredible story continues in book three of the critically acclaimed Neapolitan Novels!
In this third Neapolitan novel, Elena and Lila, the two girls whom readers first met in My Brilliant Friend, have become women.
Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts her marriage brought and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons.
Both women have attempted are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up during the nineteen-seventies.
Yet they are still very much bound to each other by a strong, unbreakable bond. (From the publisher.)
Books in the series
My Brilliant Friend (2011) is the first of Ferrante's four Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name (2012) is the second, this book is the third, and The Story of a Lost Child (2014) is the last.