The year that was, in six books

The Story of the Lost Child, by Elena Ferrante

You must have been sleeping all year if you evaded news of Ferrante. For years Ferrante’s fiction had been published to great acclaim and sold in significant quantities, especially in Italy, but globally 2015 can be called the Year of Ferrante. Lost Child, the concluding volume in the Naples quartet, came out in English translation late in the year, but by then Ferrante fever had already built up, and conversations can still be heard about which of the four books about friends Elena and Lila one should begin with. Believe it or not, many recommend starting with the second, looping back to the first, and then to the third and fourth! There is still a mystery about who Ferrante is, whether “she” is in fact a woman, and there has been much analysis about what it means to be able to remain anonymous in our hyper-wired and networked age. And sportingly, in the interviews she occasionally does, she takes the inevitable question about her “identity”, without of course giving anything away.