Troubling Love

"The raging, tormented voice of the author is something rare."-The New York Times

Following her mother's untimely and mysterious death, Delia embarks on a voyage of discovery through the streets of her native Naples searching for the truth about her family. A series of mysterious telephone calls leads her to compelling and disturbing revelations about her mother's final days.

This stylish fiction from the author of The Days of Abandonment is set in a beguiling but often hostile Naples, whose chaotic, suffocating streets become one of the book's central motifs. A story about mothers and daughters and the complicated knot of lies and emotions that binds them.

“Everyone should read anything with Ferrantes name on it.” —The Boston Globe

“Ferrantes novels are intensely, violently personal, and because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader.” —James Wood, The New Yorker

“One of the more nuanced portraits of feminine friendship in recent memory.” —Megan OGrady, Vogue

“Amazing! My Brilliant Friend took my breath away. If I were president of the world I would make everyone read this book. It is so honest and right and opens up heart to so much. Reading Ferrante reminded me of that child-like excitement when you cant look up from the page, when your eyes seem to be popping from your head, when you think: I didnt know books could do this!” —Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge

“Elena Ferrante will blow you away.” —Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones

“Ferrantes emotional and carnal candor are so potent." —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“I like the Italian writer, Elena Ferrante, a lot. I've been reading all her work and all about her.” — John Waters, actor and director

“"Elena Ferrante tackles girlhood and friendship with amazing force.”— Gwenyth Paltrow

“Elena Ferrante may be the best contemporary novelist youve never heard of”— The Economist

“[Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels] dont merely offer a teeming vision of working-class Naples, with its cobblers and professors, communists and mobbed-up businessmen, womanizing poets and downtrodden wives; they present one of modern fictions richest portraits of a friendship.” —John Powers, Fresh Air, NPR

“Ferrantes freshness has nothing to do with fashion…it is imbued with the most haunting music of all, the echoes of literary history.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Elena Ferrantes THE STORY OF A NEW NAME, book two in her Naples series. Two words. Read it.” —Ann Hood, author of The Obituary Writer

“Ferrante writes with a ferocious, intimate urgency.” —Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death: A Memoir

“The Days of Abandonment is a powerful, heartrending novel.” —Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Lowlands

“I am such a fan of Ferrantes work, and have been for quite a while.” —Jennifer Gilmore, author of The Mothers

“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, The Australian

“The womens fraught relationship and shifting fortunes are the life forces of the poignant book” — Publishers Weekly

"An engrossing, wildly original contemporary epic about the demonic power of human (and particularly female) creativity checked by the forces of history and society." — The Los Angeles Review of Books

A woman goes home to Naples after her mother's mysterious death in a "tour de force" by the New York Times-bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend (Seattle Times).

Following her mother's untimely and unexplained drowning, which was preceded by a series of strange phone calls, forty-five-year-old Delia leaves Rome and embarks on a voyage of discovery through the beguiling yet often hostile streets of her native Naples. She is searching for the truth about her family and the men in her mother's life, past and present, including an abusive husband. What she discovers will be more unsettling than she imagines, but will also reveal truths about herself, in this psychological mystery marked by "tactile, beautifully restrained prose" (Publishers Weekly) about mothers and daughters and the complicated knot of lies and emotions that binds them.

"Ferrante's polished language belies the rawness of her imagery." --The New Yorker

"With the quick-paced mystery guiding the story, Delia explores her relationship with her mother, unraveling memories and secrets repressed since childhood and coming to terms with an upbringing filled with jealousy and violence . . . Troubling Love is vivid and powerful." --Library Journal