Lina y Elena son ahora adultas y han tomado caminos distintos: Elena dej N poles para casarse y convertirse en una escritora de xito en Florencia. Solo un amor de juventud que vuelve a florecer la devolver a N poles, donde la espera Lina, que ahora es madre y adem s ha triunfado muy a su manera en el negocio local. Elena es la se ora culta, Lina es en apariencia la mujer de barrio, ignorante y poco dispuesta al refinamiento, pero la inteligencia pura y la intuici n est n del lado de Lina.

Los hechos se precipitan cuando un buen d a de repente, la hija de Lina desaparece: asesinato, rapto, muerte? Nadie sabe, y el barrio murmura. Desde entonces, Lina ya no es la misma y la locura acecha. Todo -los hombres, las mujeres, el paisaje, la ciudad entera de N poles- se convierten en testigos del duelo de una madre que no sabe llorar y un buen d a tambi n desaparecer , devolviendo al lector a las primeras p ginas de esta espl ndida saga.

Inteligencia, emoci n contenida, escritura que se pliega a los acontecimientos y se ajusta como un guante a la trama: todo est en estas p ginas donde se ha ido cosiendo una de las obras m s brillantes del siglo XXI.

«Quer a contar solo la vida de dos mujeres. Y para hacerlo era necesario que filtrara la historia en el trasfondo de sus existencias, las cosas que de un modo u otro ten an que ver con ellas. Me gustar a que el relato ayudase a contemplar en t rminos narrativos un pedazo de la historia de Italia. .-Elena Ferrante

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Soon to be an HBO series, book four in the New York Times bestselling Neapolitan quartet about two friends in post-war Italy is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted epic by one of today's most beloved and acclaimed writers, Elena Ferrante, one of the great novelists of our time. (Roxana Robinson, The New York Times)

Here is the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery uncontainable Lila. In this book, life's great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women's friendship, examined in its every detail over the course of four books, remains the gravitational center of their lives. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. But now, she has returned to Naples to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood. Yet somehow this proximity to a world she has always rejected only brings her role as unacknowledged leader of that world into relief.

Ferrante is one of the world's great storytellers. With the Neapolitan quartet she has given her readers an abundant, generous, and masterfully plotted page-turner that is also a stylish work of literary fiction destined to delight readers for many generations to come.