Elena Ferrante

Italian teenager Giovanna searches for a sense of identity and clear perspectives when she finds herself torn between the refinements and excesses of a divided Naples. Giovannas pretty face is changing, turning ugly, at least so her father thinks. Giovanna, he says, looks more like her Aunt Vittoria every day. But can it be true? Is she really changing? Is she turning into her Aunt Vittoria, a woman she hardly knows but whom her mother and father...

Since the publication of My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan novels, Elena Ferrante's fame as one of our most compelling, insightful, and stylish contemporary authors has grown enormously. She has gained admirers among authors--Jhumpa Lahiri, Elizabeth Strout, Claire Messud, to name a few--and critics--James Wood, John Freeman, Eugenia Williamson, for example. But her most resounding success has undoubtedly been with readers, who have...

The brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery uncontainable Lila have made life's great discoveries, its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up-- a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Now, in a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous--and in a world undergoing epochal change--Lila and Elena clash, drift apart, reconcile, and clash again, in the process revealing...

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship.ÿThe story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing...