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—Jhumpa Lahiri, Elizabeth Strout, Claire Messud, to name a few—and critics—James Wood, John Freeman, Eugenia Williamson, for example. 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. 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.

Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008) and the Neapolitan Quartet (Europa 2012-2015). She is also the author of a children’s picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night.

• Sep 9 2015
  THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY is #36 on the ABA Indie Bookstore Bestseller List
  
• Aug 31 2015
  RALPH Mag: "It's a matter-of-fact, serious, rigorously intelligent, deeply honest voice that pushes until it understands the truth behind what happens."
  
• Aug 7 2015
  “It's difficult for me to exaggerate how moving, how beautiful and how thought-provoking these novels are, how piercing Ferrante's insight is.”
  — Material Witness
• Jul 31 2015
  Turnaround Publisher Services: “Ferrante’s dedication to the working class is deeply satisfying. No matter how much delight you take in Elena’s cultural and intellectual strides, those figures from her childhood always take the spotlight.”
  
• Jul 29 2015
  The Independent’s list of alternative Man Booker Longlist titles: THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY
  
• Jun 8 2015
  Joseph Luzzi’s “The Luzzi List”: “her unique prose, humming with intelligence, reminded me of some the very greats in the nation’s history."