Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Lib/E
The incredible story continues in book three of the critically acclaimed Neapolitan novels!
In this third Neapolitan novel, Elena and Lila, the two girls whom readers first met in My Brilliant Friend, have become women. 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 during the 1970s. Yet they are still very much bound to each other by a strong, unbreakable bond.
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Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), and The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), now a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, and Paul Mescal. She is also the author of Incidental Inventions (Europa, 2019), illustrated by Andrea Ucini, Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey (Europa, 2016) 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 by Europa Editions in English between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018. Ferrante's most recent novel, the New York Times bestselling The Lying Life of Adults, was published in 2020 by Europa Editions.
Hillary Huber is one of the most successful voice talents in Los Angeles. Recent books read for Blackstone Audio include Him, Her, Him Again, the End of Him by Patricia Marx, A Field of Darkness by Cornelia Read, and A Map of Glass by Jane Urquhart.
Ann Goldstein has translated all of Elena Ferrante's books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Lying Life of Adults, and the international bestseller, My Brilliant Friend. She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award. She lives in New York.
Ferrante writes with the kind of power saved for weather systems with female names, sparing no one, and Those Who Stay is a tour de force. I don't want to read anything else.
-- "Jennifer Gilmore, New York Times bestselling author of Golden Country"Elena Ferrante is one of the great novelists of our time.
-- "New York Times Book Review"Surpass[es] the rapturous storytelling of the previous titles in the Neapolitan Novels.
-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Rising far above the melodrama of a typical coming-of-age story, this third in Ferrante's four Neapolitan novels exhibits keen intellectual curiosity and heartfelt passion as it continues to explore the lives of childhood friends Lina and Elena...Superbly translated, this tour de force shows off Ferrante's strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series.
-- "Library Journal (starred review)"Ferrante continues to imbue this growing saga with great magic, treating the girls' years of marriage and motherhood with breathtaking honesty while envisaging the turbulence of political and social unrest in 1970s Italy. Though originally planned as a trilogy, the story doesn't finish here, as this book ends with a hook that will leave readers eagerly awaiting the next installment.
-- "Booklist (starred review)"Ferrante's lucid rendering of Lila's and Elena's entwined yet discrete lives illustrates both that the personal is political and that novels of ideas can compel as much as their lighter-weight counterparts.
-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"Ferrante has authored a 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman' that captures not only the forging of a self but the salvaging of it.
-- "Vogue, praise for the series"
