THE LACK OF LIGHT

by suicide 20 years earlier—a fact we learn in the first chapter but come to fully understand only 700 eagerly turned pages later. The narrator is Keto, who grows up in a delightfully quirky household with two battling grandmothers, a widowed physicist father, and a beloved older brother\u003B the story follows her friendships with brilliant Ira, daring Dina, and beautiful Nene, the darling daughter of a mobster family, from their schoolyard beginnings, through young loves, emerging talents, and life\u002Dchanging decisions, everything thrown into high relief by the unfolding disaster around them. Ferrante lovers will find many echoes of the Neapolitan novels here, the plot similarly featuring almost mythic levels of intensity in love and grief, centering the importance of women’s friendship. An unexpectedly moving translators’ note says that the novel, while not autobiographical, is probably Haratischwili’s \u0022most personal work to date,\u0022 a history strongly felt in myriad gorgeously written summary passages like this one: “We, the children of the nineties, who swapped our childhood and youth for Kalashnikovs and heroin—we, of all people, listened to Barry White and longed for nothing more than eternal love and the ecstatic fruits of that love, for fun and excitement. We, of all people, let the music play. And how! We played it right to the bitter end.”"