
Through politics, feminism, private turmoil and work, the two struggle not only to define their lives but to save their neighbourhood from the corruption of the Camorristi, as embodied in the Solara brothers.

“It was as if… the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other,” Lenù told us in My Brilliant Friend, “and there is no reconciliation to this paradox.” The theme of girls as interdependent or parasitic opposites is older than Little Women, the book that so impresses them as children, and goes beyond Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. In the first half of this volume, we discover the true depths of Nino’s treachery Lila’s instinctive, magnetic brilliance seems to have finally found an outlet in computing, and the two women, both working mothers, both pregnant with daughters, live harmoniously in the same shabby Neapolitan house. When the third volume ( Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay) closed, Lenù was a successful young novelist who, stifled by marriage and motherhood, had left her gentle academic husband to live with her childhood love Nino, whom everyone tells her is a shit. The Story of the Lost Child is the final quarter in a whole that is about much more than the demonic friendship and rivalry between its narrator, Lenù, and Lila, whom we have followed from childhood in the slums of postwar Naples to old age in the 21st century.
