When Leda's daughters leave home to be with their father, she decides to take a trip to a small coastal town in Italy, but soon after she arrives memories from her unsettled past come back to haunt her.

The "stunning conclusion" to the bestselling saga of the fierce lifelong bond between two women, from a gritty Naples childhood through old age (Publishers Weekly, starred review). The Story of the Lost Child concludes the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila, who first met amid the shambles of postwar Italy. In this book, life's great discoveries have been made; its vagaries and losses have been...

Once an aspiring writer, Olga traded literary ambition for marriage and motherhood; when Mario dumps her after 15 years, she is utterly unprepared. Though she tells herself that she is a competent woman, nothing like the poverella (poor abandoned wife) that mothers whispered about in her childhood, Olga falls completely apart. Routine chores overwhelm her; she neglects her appearance and forgets her manners; she throws herself at the older musician...

Friends Elena and Lila have become women. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and now works as a common laborer. Elena left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and has published a successful novel. Both women are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance, and submission. Afloat on the sea of opportunities that opened up during the 1970s, they are still...