Best of 2015

Book Culture

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The Best 15 Books of 2015: 112th St.

3. The Story of the Lost Child  by Elena Ferrante
Synopsis: This fourth and final installment in the series raises the bar even higher and indeed confirms Elena Ferrante as one of the world’s best living storytellers.
Here is the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery uncontainable Lila. In this book, both are adults; life’s great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women’s friendship, examined in its every detail over the course of four books, remains the gravitational center of their lives. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. But now, she has returned to Naples to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples

The Guardian

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The best novels of 2015

A truly vintage year for fiction with a strong Booker shortlist, dazzling debuts and a real masterpiece from an old hand

by Alex Preston

This year, though (like last year), was all about the bewitching enigma of Elena Ferrante. The Story of the Lost Child (Europa Editions), the final installation of her Neapolitan quartet, was every bit as sinister and compelling as its predecessors, a vivid and haunting portrait of female friendship that confirms Ferrante as one of the masters of her craft.

 

The Sunday Times

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Take your pick of the year’s finest books

We recommend the exceptional novels of 2015

This final book in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet brings a phenomenal literary enterprise to an arresting conclusion. In it the story of a sometimes supportive, sometimes rivalrous female friendship, begun in childhood amid a crime-ridden locality of 1950s Naples, continues from the 1970s to the present day. Like the preceding volumes, it is a masterpiece of immersion (in the complexities of its central figures and in Italian family, social and political life). Powerfully featuring abduction, murder, suicide, marital crises and fraught love affairs, its narrative is a masterpiece of casual-seeming craftsmanship.

 

Time

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Top 10 Fiction Books

1. The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante

At the beginning of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Lila Cerullo and Elena Greco are two little girls playing with dolls on the streets of their rough Naples neighborhood. By the final installment, against all odds, Elena is a respected novelist and Lila a tech entrepreneur. Their lives play out against a backdrop of political tumult, mob violence, the women’s movement and countless other upheavals of the late 20th century. But Ferrante’s novels, culminating in this year’s wrenching Story of the Lost Child, stick brilliantly to their focus: the bond between two complex women whose ambition and charisma at times unite them, and at times bitterly divide them.

Daily Mail

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Fall in love this Christmas with a good book: Something for everyone – our critics select the year’s best novels

Some of the Mail's critics reveal their top picks of this year's books , including The Whites by Richard Price, as Harry Brandt, which was called 'the crime novel of the year' by Stephen King

Over the year, the quartet, known as the Neapolitan Novels, by Elena Ferrante took a grip on readers in droves. Rightly so. The author’s anonymity does perhaps augment the novels’ mystique, but nothing can detract from the extraordinary, quietly incendiary quality of the writing.

In this first volume, the fractured, on-off friendship of the young Lila and Lenu is minutely explored within the tight-knit Neapolitan community of the Fifties, and provides the emotional heart of the novel.

Post-war, Naples is exhausted, crowded, combustible, impoverished and dominated by rigid traditional family mores and violent vendettas.

What chance do girls such as Elena (Lenu) and Lila have? Read it for its forensically observed and truthful characterisation, its rich and textured portrayal of a society groping towards modernity, the political and cultural fluctuations and its seemingly effortless prose.

Then treat yourself by becoming absorbed in the next three titles.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-3344877/Fall-love-Christmas-good-book-critics-select-year-s-best-novels.html#ixzz3td2Z0t9P
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The Pool

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The books that made my year

I read a lot of books in 2015 A. Lot. Here are the ones that stayed with me

By Sam Baker

The year Elena Ferrante sprang to attention – well, my attention, anyway – was also the year the Neapolitan quartet came to an end with The Story Of The Lost Child (published in September). What started as an intriguing portrait of female friendship became a compelling saga of the reality of women’s lives set against 60 years of Italian social and political history. Most remarkable of all, though, is the author’s enduring anonymity; a sleight of hand which has seen her championed by high- and low-brow alike, and enabled her to sideswerve even the slightest Goldfinching.

The Diane Rehm Show Blog

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‘The New York Times’ Best Books Of 2015: Our Interviews With Authors

By Alison Brody

The New York Times just came out with its list of the 10 best books of 2015. They were some of our favorites, too. Over the last year, Diane sat down and talked to several of the selected authors. Check out the interviews here:

  • For our latest Readers’ Review, Diane and her guests discussed “My Brilliant Friend,” the first book in the series of novels by Elena Ferrante that wrapped up this year with “The Story of the Lost Child.”

The Economist

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Shelf life

The best books this year are about North Korea, Detroit, Nagasaki and being a pilot

The Story of the Lost Child. By Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein. Europa; 464 pages; $18 and £11.99

This four-volume narrative, with all its operatic overtones, is a tribute to feminism and female friendship in mid-20th-century Naples. Written by a pseudonymous author whose real identity remains unknown and translated by an editor at the New Yorker, it is a wild and unlikely hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

The New York Times

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The 10 Best Books of 2015

The Story of the Lost Child: Book 4, The Neapolitan Novels: “Maturity, Old Age”
By Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein.

Like the three books that precede it in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, this brilliant conclusion offers a clamorous, headlong exploration of female friendship set against a backdrop of poverty, ambition, violence and political struggle. As Elena and Lila, the girlhood rivals whose relationship spans the series, enter the middle terrain of marriage and motherhood, Ferrante’s preoccupations remain with the inherent radicalism of modern female identity — especially, and strikingly, with the struggles of the female artist against her biological and social destiny.

The Guardian

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The best fiction of 2015

There were rich pickings from a host of top names including Kate Atkinson, Jonathan Franzen and Margaret Atwood. Plus we said goodbye to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld and revisted Harper Lee’s Scout Finch

Some mighty literary projects reached their conclusion in 2015. The Story of the Lost Child (Europa) is the fourth and final volume in Elena Ferrante’s series of Neapolitan novels, which explore female friendship and creativity against the tumultuous backdrop of Italian political violence and changing social mores. The books are startling, all-consuming, dense with plot and psychology – buy the set and begin with Elena and Lila’s childhood in My Brilliant Friend; it’ll be a long time before you come up for air.

Buzzfeed

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The 24 Best Fiction Books Of 2015

The capper to Elena Ferrante’s beloved Neopolitan quartet, The Story of the Lost Child brings to a close the story of Lila and Elena, two young women growing up together in 1950s Naples. As they climb the social ladder and cope with changing fortunes, they find both refuge and tumult in their complex friendship. The Story of the Lost Child is a satisfying and devastating culmination to a series that has grabbed readers’ hearts.

The Guardian

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Best books of 2015 – part two

From provocative novels, giants real and imagined, and new novels from past masters … authors and critics select their favourite reads of 2015

Frank Cottrell Boyce
The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson; My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante; Debt by David Graeber

The most engrossing book I read this year was The Givenness of Things (Virago), Marilynne Robinson’s celebration of the irreducible complexity of human beings. I was addicted to Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (Europa Editions). The wonder of great writing is that it uncovers our common humanity. So this northern middle-aged male found himself identifying with two teenage Neapolitan girls. I’m hoping that someone will give me the sequels for Christmas. Everyone needs to read David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years (Melville House) because it’s all true.

Elizabeth Day
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante; Hot Feminist by Polly Vernon; Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn

So many of my female friends were raving about Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child (Europa Editions) that I read all four of her Neapolitan novels in a month. I was swallowed up whole by Ferrante’s writing: the intensity of it, the unapologetic focus on every rendered nuance of a lifelong female friendship. I’ve never read anything quite like it. It is so, so good on women: the ones trapped by men and violence and the ones who break free, with all the associated costs. Hot Feminist by Polly Vernon (Hodder & Stoughton) is bold, brilliant, sharp and funny, tackling big issues (rape, abortion, equal pay) in fizzing prose. Part memoir, part polemic, it urges women to be less judgmental – of each other and of themselves. It’s an idea that shouldn’t be revolutionary but is. I loved Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn (Vintage). Ostensibly a murder mystery set in 1930s London, it is also a multiple character study of wonderful depth and wit. I cannot wait for the sequel, Freya, out in March 2016. The book I’d most like to be given for Christmas is David Lodge’s memoir, Quite a Good Time to Be Born (Harvill Secker). I’m a big fan of Lodge’s work and think he’s criminally underrated as a writer. And it’s an exceptionally good title for a memoir. Or quite a good one at least.

The Guardian

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Best books of 2015 – part one

Compelling fiction, a game-changing biography and a 900-page whopper for food nerds – writers reveal which of the past year’s books they have most enjoyed

• Which are your favourite books of the year? Nominate them here

**Paula Hawkins **
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff; A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson; The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

In Fates and Furies (William Heinemann), Lauren Groff gives us a “he said”, “she said” account of a successful marriage between two people who spend a lifetime loving each other without knowing each other. Rich, lyrical and rewarding. A God in Ruins (Doubleday) is, for me, the best of Kate Atkinson’s brilliant novels; a characteristically perceptive, poignant and complex tale of one man’s attempt to live a “good, quiet life” in the 20th century. I’m very late to the Elena Ferrante party and have yet to read the Neapolitan novels, but I found The Days of Abandonment (Europa) quite extraordinary – a deeply discomforting, visceral tale of a woman unravelling.

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