Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay - (Neapolitan Novels) by Elena Ferrante (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Part of the bestselling saga about childhood friends following different paths by "one of the great novelists of our time" (The New York Times).

In the third book in the New York Times-bestselling Neapolitan quartet that inspired the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, Elena and Lila have grown into womanhood. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts her marriage brought and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons. Both women are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance, and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up for women during the 1970s. And yet, they are still very much bound to each other in a book that "shows off Ferrante's strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series" (Library Journal).

"One of modern fiction's richest portraits of a friendship." --NPR

Review Quotes

Praise for Elena Ferrante and the Neapolitan Novels

"A large, captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman."--James Wood, The New Yorker

"One of modern fiction's richest portraits of a friendship."--John Powers, NPR's Fresh Air

"Elena Ferrante is one of the great novelists of our time."--Roxana Robinson, The New York Times Book Review

"Compelling, visceral and immediate...The Neapolitan novels are a tour de force."--Jennifer Gilmore, The Los Angeles Times

"It took my breath away...so honest and right and opens up heart to so much."--Elizabeth Strout, writer

"The Neapolitan novel cycle is an unconditional masterpiece."--Jhumpa Lahiri, writer

"Everyone should read anything with Ferrante's name on it."--Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe

"Ferrante's own writing has no limits, is willing to take every thought forward to its most radical conclusion and backwards to its most radical birthing."---The New Yorker

"One of the more nuanced portraits of feminine friendship in recent memory."--Megan O'Grady, Vogue

"It's just hypnotic. I could not stop reading it or thinking about it."--Hillary Clinton

"Ferrante tackles girlhood and friendship with amazing force."--Gwyneth Paltrow, actor

"Ferrante's writing seems to say something that hasn't been said before in a way so compelling its readers forget where they are, abandon friends and disdain sleep."--Joanna Biggs, The London Review of Books

"Ferrante has written about female identity with a heft and sharpness unmatched by anyone since Doris Lessing."--Elizabeth Lowry, The Wall Street Journal

"No one has a voice quite like Ferrante's. Her gritty, ruthlessly frank novels roar off the page with a barbed fury, like an attack that is also a defense...Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you'll have some idea of how explosive these works are."--John Freeman, writer

"When I read the Neapolitan novels I find that I never want to stop."--Molly Fischer, The New Yorker

"Dazzling...stunning...an extraordinary epic."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Spectacular."--Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

"What words do you save? Here's your chance to bring them out, like the silver for the wedding of the first-born: genius, tour de force, masterpiece. They apply to the work of Elena Ferrante...her magnificent Neapolitan quartet seems to me to be the greatest achievement in fiction of the post-war era."--Charles Finch, The Chicago Tribune

"We are dealing with masterpieces here, old-fashioned classics, filled with passion and pathos...The sheer power of her books is a challenge to the chilly, dour craftsmanship of too many 21st century literary novels."--Joe Klein, TIME Magazine

"The saga is both comfortingly traditional and radically fresh, it gives readers not just what they want, but something more than they didn't know they craved...through this fusion of high and low art, Ms. Ferrante emerges as a 21st-century Dickens."--The Economist

"Ferrante's accomplishment in these novels is to extract an enduring masterpiece from dissolving margins, from the commingling of self and other, creator and created, new and old, real and whatever the opposite of real may be...Ferrante's voice is very much her own, but its force is communal."--Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic

"Ferrante adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience."--Rachel Cusk, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), which was made into a film directed by Roberto Faenza, Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), adapted by Mario Martone, and The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), soon to be a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. She is also the author of a Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey (Europa, 2016) in which she recounts her experience as a novelist, and a children's picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night (Europa, 2016). The four volumes known as the "Neapolitan quartet" (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child) were published in America by Europa between 2012 and 2015. The first season of the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, directed by Severio Costanzo premiered in 2018.
Ann Goldstein is an editor at The New Yorker. Her translations for Europa Editions include novels by Amara Lakhous, Alessandro Piperno, and Elena Ferrante's bestselling My Brilliant Friend. She lives in New York.