My Brilliant Friend: Neapolitan Novels, Book One [Paperback]

Now an HBO series.

Book one in theNew York Timesbestselling Neapolitan quartet about two friends growing up in post-war Italy is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted family epic by Italy’s most beloved and acclaimed writer, Elena Ferrante, “one of the great novelists of our time.” (Roxana Robinson,The New York Times)
 
Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its protagonists, the fiery and unforgettable Lila, and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflictual friendship. Book one in the series follows Lila and Elena from their first fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence. 

Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists.

“An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends,” writesEntertainment Weekly. “Spectacular,” says Maureen Corrigan onNPR’s Fresh Air. “A large, captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman,” writes James Wood inThe New Yorker.

Ferrante is one of the world’s great storytellers. WithMy Brilliant Friendshe has given her readers an abundant, generous, and masterfully plotted page-turner that is also a stylish work of literary fiction destined to delight readers for many generations to come.

ITPraise for Elena Ferrante and The Neapolitan Novels

The United States

“Ferrante’s novels are intensely, violently personal, and because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader.”
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