But instead of the expected loneliness, she feels oddly secure. With her grown daughters now living in Canada with her ex-husband, Leda is finally alone and free to dedicate herself to her work. Like her compatriot, the late Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, who, in his novels and short fiction, never hesitated to reveal the moral shortcomings of the inhabitants of his native island or Italian society at large that so willingly accepts the political corruption that is fatte in Italia (made In Italy) as much as Gucci, Maserati and a good Barolo, Ferrante pulls back the layers of escapist fantasy and exposes all those disturbing shadows hiding underneath that Mediterranean sun. This is not the bel paese of modern marketing mythology, the one imagined by innumerable vacationers and perpetuated as some paradiso-on-earth in everything from glossy travel magazines to books/films like Under the Tuscan Sun, a never-neverland where the inhabitants are full of life, family and amore.

The revelations of Leda, a middle-aged Neapolitan-born divorced mother of two and professor of English literature, are all the more unsettling for the sun-drenched idyllic setting-an Italian coastal town-in which her shadowy secrets are revealed. “The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand.” With that simple and unnerving sentence on the second page of this astonishingly economic novel, author Elena Ferrante is giving readers fair warning: brace yourselves, painful, discomforting truths are about to be revealed in this book about daughters and mothers and the women struggling to be both.

Elena ferrante book order