In the third book in the Neapolitan quartet, 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 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.
Ferrante is one of the world's great storytellers. With the Neapolitan quartet she has given her readers an abundant, generous, and masterfully plotted page-turner that is also a stylish work of literary fiction destined to delight readers for many generations to come.
Романистка появилась на свет в 1943 году в Неаполе, получила высшее филологическое образование. Существует версия, что Элена Ферранте – творческий псевдоним, под которым скрываются владельцы издательства Edizioni, супруги Сандро Ферри и Сандра Оццола. Писательница не опровергает эту информацию, однако, считает, что книги живут как автономные организмы, на которые не должна влиять личность автора. К тому же, сохраняя инкогнито, романистка не вступает в контакт со СМИ и концентрируется только на творчестве.
Издатели Ферранте опубликовали книгу "La Frantumaglia", в которой собрали немногочисленные интервью и письма автора.