Not a beach read — a book about what the beach is covering up.
The Lost Daughter
On a beach holiday, a middle-aged professor steals a child's doll and confronts memories of the years she left her daughters.
159g
Weighs the same as Top Ramen + Tuna Packet
- Lightweight
- Past Bedtime
- Fiction
Elena Ferrante published this short novel before the Neapolitan quartet made her a phenomenon. Leda, a 47-year-old professor alone on a southern Italian beach holiday, expects a tranquil summer after her adult daughters move away. Instead, she becomes fixated on a young mother—and then, on an impulse she can't explain, steals the woman's doll. From that small theft, Ferrante exposes the least sayable feelings of motherhood with surgical honesty. Not a beach read—a book about what the beach is covering up.
Field notes
Ferrante has called The Lost Daughter the book that made her feel most guilty. She pushed Leda beyond what she herself thought she could bear, constructing a story around an inexplicable act that even its narrator cannot fully understand. Ferrante later described the novel as the starting point for the Neapolitan quartet: she began with another story of difficult female friendship, expecting to write perhaps 150 pages, and found herself writing four novels exploring the tangled loyalties, rivalries, and identities of women who are mothers, daughters, and friends.