Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is a 2013 novel written by Italian author Elena Ferrante. It is the third installment of her Neapolitan Novels, preceded by My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name, and succeeded by The Story of the Lost Child. It was translated to English by Ann Goldstein in 2014. Lenù tells Lila she plans to leave her husband to be with Nino, which horrifies her friend. Nino tells her he can't leave his wife, and Lenù decides to leave Pietro with or without him. The book ends when they board a plane together. Both women are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance, and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up for women during the 1970s. And yet, they are still very much bound to each other in a book that “shows off Ferrante’s strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series” ( Library Journal). It would be difficult to find a deeper portrait of women’s friendship than the one in Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, which unfold from the fifties to the twenty-first century to tell a single story with the possessive force of an origin myth.”

Regardless of who is behind the name Elena Ferrante, the mysterious pseudonym used by the author of the Neapolitan novels, two things are certain: she is a woman and she knows how to describe Naples like nobody else. She does so with a style that recalls an enchanted spider web with its expressive power and the wizardry with which it creates an entire world.” — Huffington Post (Italy) Elena Ferrante is the author of several remarkable, lucid, austerely honest novels . . . My Brilliant Friend is a large, captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman.” Reclusive Author Elena Ferrante Talks 'My Brilliant Friend' HBO Adaptation". The Hollywood Reporter. 16 October 2018. Part of the bestselling saga about childhood friends following different paths by “one of the great novelists of our time” ( The New York Times).Meghan O'Rourke (2014-10-31). "Elena Ferrante: the global literary sensation nobody knows". The Guardian . Retrieved 2015-07-20. The tension between Lila and Lenu is often considered the central point of the novels, as Matteo Pericoli wrote for The Paris Review: "From a structural point of view, tension and compression often meld into each another. In this building, two volumes are interwoven by strong connecting rods, extended columns and daring beams, with one of the two seemingly suspended from the other. With its mass and swirled dynamism, the suspended volume (that we will call Lila) seems to be slipping away from the one that is holding it up (that we will call Elena) making it extend and stretch as if it was Lila that was shaping Elena and providing her with her dynamic energy, so vital to any piece of architecture." [7] Nino would last a single night, he would leave me in the morning. Even though I had known him forever, he was made of dreams, and holding on to him forever would have been impossible: he came from childhood, he was constructed out of childish desires, he had no concreteness, he didn’t face the future. Pietro, on the other hand, was of the present, massive, a boundary stone. He marked a land new to me, a land of good reasons, governed by rules that originated in his family and endowed everything with meaning. Elena Ferrante is the author of several remarkable, lucid, austerely honest novels . . . My Brilliant Friend is a large, captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman.” Beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein . . . Ferrante writes with a ferocious, intimate urgency that is a celebration of anger. Ferrante is terribly good with anger, a very specific sort of wrath harbored by women, who are so often not allowed to give voice to it. We are angry, a lot of the time, at the position we’re in—whether it’s as wife, daughter, mother, friend—and I can think of no other woman writing who is so swift and gorgeous in this rage, so bracingly fearless in miningfury.” — Susanna Sonnenberg , The San Francisco Chronicle

A meeting with Pietro’s sister Mariarosa introduces Elena to the feminist cause, and there she finds her voice. As a model for her own life, Elena explores how women can only be defined in society by their men. In the midst of a creative frenzy that finally gives her life, Nino Sarratore shows up once more and plants small seeds of dissent in Elena’s heart. Next to Nino, Pietro looks even more drab and dull, while Nino is filled with vibrant ideas and political furor. Under Nino’s encouragement, Elena finishes her essay and it is brilliant. The two begin an affair that eventually ends with both of them leaving their families and traveling away together. When I read [the Neapolitan novels] I find that I never want to stop. I feel vexed by the obstacles—my job, or acquaintances on the subway—that threaten to keep me apart from the books. I mourn separations (a year until the next one—how?). I am propelled by a ravenous will to keep going.” — Molly Fischer , The New Yorker This interdisciplinary conference aims to bring together researchers from different fields – political science, education, anthropology, history, political economy, and sociology, among others – who explore the socio-political and economic consequences of emigration for sending countries, regions and communities.Elena Ferrante is the author of several remarkable, lucid, austerely honest novels . . . My Brilliant Friend is a large, captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman.” — James Wood , The New Yorker Elena Ferrante’s female characters are genuine works of art . . . It is clear that her novel is the child of Italian neorealism and an abiding fascination with scene.” Elena Ferrante may be the best contemporary novelist you have never heard of. The Italian author has written six lavishly praised novels. But she writes under a pseudonym and will not offer herself for public consumption. Her characters likewise defy convention . . . Her prose is crystal, and her storytelling both visceral and compelling.”

Elena Ferrante's Naples: A Visual Promenade." Le Nouvel Observateur, October 28, 2016. A tour of the novels' Neapolitan settings.

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While each of her novels is uniquely beguiling, they interrogate a shared set of concerns and obsessions, with bracing narrative frankness. The cumulative effect of her oeuvre is that of reading the distillation of someone’s deepest, most furtive thoughts. Compelling, visceral and immediate . . . a riveting examination of power . . . The Neapolitan novels are a tour de force.” — Jennifer Gilmore , The Los Angeles Times