Elena Ferrante wrote a children’s book so that kids can learn life’s brutal realities
Fans of the secretive, bestselling Italian author Elena Ferrante will soon be able to share her fiction with the next generation.
Best known for her compulsively readable Neapolitan series, Ferrante also published a children’s book in Italy in 2007: La Spiaggia di Notte. It will finally be released in English on Dec. 6 this year, according to a representative from her publisher, Europa Editions.
The Beach at Night is a fairy tale that follows the lost doll from Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter, with illustrations by Mara Cerri.
Readers will recognize the abandoned loved ones and night of beach-set terror that feature prominently in Ferrante’s addictive andmassively successful tetralogy. In the story, the doll Celina “lives a night of hell” on the beach, and has to survive the violent reign of the Cruel Coastguard and his accomplice, the Big Rake, who pile lost objects into a huge fire.