The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante. In a letter to her publishers, this Italian author, whose real identity is unknown and who gives no interviews, wrote, “I am interested in everything that focuses on the female body at work.” But what really strikes me about this writer is her crystalline, psychologically honest, sentence-by-sentence depiction of the way we, and especially women, think. It all makes startling sense, even our unhinged extremes, when written in Ferrante’s pellucid voice.