The Artery

Fiction, Biography, Poetry And More — The Best Books Of 2015

Maureen Dezell)

1. “The Story of the Lost Child,” by Elena Ferrante: Ferrante brings her Neapolitan quartet to a poignant, provocative close in “The Story of the Lost Child.” While the book lacks some of the vivacity and bombast of others in the series, it provides a worthy conclusion to a breathtakingly original, 60-year saga of a “splendid, shadowy friendship” between the sober and studious Elena Greco, and her “terrible, dazzling” friend Lila Cerullo. Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels are often described as stories of female friendship. It’s an accurate but anemic depiction of the passionate, fantastically fraught, relationship between the two.