The Lost Daughter
Leda is a divorced English literature professor whose two grown daughters have moved with their father to Toronto, leaving her with the rare and unsettling freedom of solitude. She rents a small apartment on the Ionian coast of Italy for the summer and means to read and swim and do nothing in particular. The arrival of a loud Neapolitan family on the beach disrupts that plan: among them is Nina, a young mother whose intimacy with her small daughter Elena reminds Leda violently of her own years of motherhood. When Elena's doll goes missing, Leda makes a small, transgressive choice she cannot explain to herself, and the rest of the holiday becomes a slow reckoning with the things she did and failed to do as a mother. Elena Ferrante's tightly compressed novel, later adapted into Maggie Gyllenhaal's debut film, is one of the most unsparing portraits of maternal ambivalence in contemporary fiction.
What you might want to know about The Lost Daughter
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Leda, a divorced literature professor whose two grown daughters have moved to her ex-husband in Toronto, takes a quiet summer holiday on the Ionian coast. On the beach she becomes fixed on a loud Neapolitan family, especially the young mother Nina and her small daughter Elena's lost doll.
Yes. The Lost Daughter (La figlia oscura, 2006) is Elena Ferrante's third novel. The English translation is by Ann Goldstein, who also translates Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels.
Yes. Maggie Gyllenhaal directed a 2021 film adaptation starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, and Jessie Buckley. The film won the Volpi Cup for Best Screenplay at Venice and was nominated for three Academy Awards.
The Lost Daughter is 528 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Lost Daughter takes most readers 8 to 11 hours to finish.
The Lost Daughter is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Lost Daughter is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
