"[Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels] don't merely offer a teeming vision of working-class Naples, with its cobblers and professors, communists and mobbed-up businessmen, womanizing poets and downtrodden wives; they present one of modern fiction's richest portraits of a friendship." —John Powers, Fresh Air, NPR 

The second book, following 2012’s acclaimed My Brilliant Friend, featuring the two friends Lila and Elena. The two protagonists are now in their twenties. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila. Meanwhile, Elena continues her journey of self-discovery. The two young women share a complex and evolving bond that brings them close at times, and drives them apart at others. Each vacillates between hurtful disregard and profound love for the other. With this complicated and meticulously portrayed friendship at the center of their emotional lives, the two girls mature into women, paying the sometimes cruel price that this passage exacts.

Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), which was made into a film directed by Roberto Faenza, Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), adapted by Mario Martone, and The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), soon to be a major motion picture directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Oscar Award-winner Olivia Colman. She is also the author of Incidental Inventions (Europa, 2019), illustrated by Andrea Ucini, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (Europa, 2016) and The Beach at Night (Europa, 2016), illustrated by Mara Cerri. The four volumes known as the “Neapolitan quartet” (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child) were published by Europa Editions in English between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018. Her most recent novel is The Lying Life of Adults (Europa, 2020).

• Sep 28 2015
  The Phraser. “It’s raw and brilliant, with a light that shines unblinking on its characters.”
  
• Sep 20 2015
  Mirabile Dictu: "Are Ferrante’s books autobiographical, as everyone speculates? Yes, perhaps: we all have difficult friendships; but these also seem to be about different aspects of the same person."
  
• Sep 19 2015
  The Idle Woman: "The prose isn't pretty or elegant: the English translation (by Ann Goldstein) is terrifically simple and understated . . . But it's the power of the emotions bleeding through the words that grips you."
  
• Sep 13 2015
  Bookish Ramblings: “Ferrante is able to evoke a world that [. . .] is both ‘fresh’ and ‘alive’, full of mystery and beauty, and one that deserves to be read and re-read.”
  
• Sep 9 2015
  THE STORY OF A NEW NAME is #29 on the ABA Indie Bookstore Bestseller List
  
• Sep 7 2015
  The Guardian: "the only book ever to make me shout out loud at a revelation in the story."