Troubling Love is the first novel published by Italian writer Elena Ferrante. It was originally published in 1992, but only translated to English, by Ann Goldstein, in 2006, following the critical success of Ferrante's following novel, The Days of Abandonment. The book was nominated for the prestigious Strega Prize, and won the Procida-Isola di Arturo-Elsa Morante Prize. The book was adapted to the cinema in 1995, becoming the feature film Nasty Love, directed by Mario Martone. Plot Delia goes back to Naples, her native city, when her mother dies in strange circumstances. There, she rediscovers hidden corners of her personality and comes to understand her relationship to her mother. The story is entirely narrated in the first person by the protagonist, forced to return to the places of her childhood and to collide again with a reality she had escaped. Delia's mother, Amalia, was a poor seamstress who had been found dead at a beach, presumed drowned, wearing only a luxury bra. Delia can not understand how her mother ended there, and she tries to reconstruct her mother's life step by step. Soon Delia decides to devote herself to the analysis of the male figures present in Amalia's life: her brother (and Delia's uncle) Filippo, a now elderly and weak man, with an expansive and outgoing character; her husband (and Delia's father) from whom Amalia had run away more than twenty years earlier, a dull, violent and extremely jealous man; finally Nicola Polledro, known as Caserta, the charming old man who, in the last period, the widow De Riso (a neighbor) used to see coming and going from Amalia's house. Delia, in her painful process of mourning and reconstruction of the facts, spends a lot of time with her uncle Filippo who, in a confused and unreliable way, helps her to remember some of the cruel impositions and domestic violence that Amalia had been forced to suffer. Delia decides to delve even deeper into this compulsive search for details on the life of her mother, that appears to her to be passionate, intricate and fascinating. To find out more she decides to look for Caserta, who seems to want to play with her through confused signals, chases and sudden appearances. To get to him, the protagonist decides to track down Antonio Polledro, her childhood friend and Caserta's son, with whom she experiences a brief sexual episode aimed at increasingly obsessively