Leda, a middle-aged academic, travels alone to the Italian coast for what should be a quiet holiday, but her encounter with a young mother and child on the beach begins to unsettle everything she has kept carefully arranged.

Suddenly her relationship with her daughters, her memories of maternal rage, and the parts of herself that never became properly civilised, all become very much at stake. This is Ferrante at her most compressed and psychologically brutal. The drama is small on the surface — a beach, a doll, a family, a woman watching too closely — but underneath it is all dread, projection, shame, envy, intellectual vanity, bodily irritation, and the violence of being needed. Very much for readers of Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, Natalia Ginzburg, Jenny Offill, or anyone interested in motherhood written without sentimental laundering.

Text Publishing paperback edition, published in Australia in 2015. First published in Italian in 2006 by Edizioni E/O as La figlia oscura; first published in English in 2008 by Europa Editions; translated by Ann Goldstein. Good second-hand condition with light shelfwear and page toning.