My Brilliant Friend (The Neapolitan Novels #1)
#1 BEST BOOK OF THE CENTURY - NEW YORK TIMES

Now an HBO series: the first volume in the New York Times–bestselling “enduring masterpiece” about a lifelong friendship between two women from Naples (The Atlantic).

Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its main characters, 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 conflicted friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their 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 two women.

“An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Spectacular.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

“Captivating.”—The New Yorker

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My Brilliant Friend (The Neapolitan Novels #1)
#1 BEST BOOK OF THE CENTURY - NEW YORK TIMES

Now an HBO series: the first volume in the New York Times–bestselling “enduring masterpiece” about a lifelong friendship between two women from Naples (The Atlantic).

Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its main characters, 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 conflicted friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their 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 two women.

“An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Spectacular.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

“Captivating.”—The New Yorker

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My Brilliant Friend (The Neapolitan Novels #1)

My Brilliant Friend (The Neapolitan Novels #1)

My Brilliant Friend (The Neapolitan Novels #1)

My Brilliant Friend (The Neapolitan Novels #1)

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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Beloved by booksellers, readers and writers including Elizabeth Strout, Zadie Smith, and Jhumpa Lahiri, the first installment in the Neopolitan Novels series is deeply satisfying story of friendship, childhood and coming-of-age.

#1 BEST BOOK OF THE CENTURY - NEW YORK TIMES

Now an HBO series: the first volume in the New York Times–bestselling “enduring masterpiece” about a lifelong friendship between two women from Naples (The Atlantic).

Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its main characters, 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 conflicted friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their 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 two women.

“An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Spectacular.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

“Captivating.”—The New Yorker


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781609450786
Publisher: Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date: 09/25/2012
Series: Neapolitan Novels Series , #1
Pages: 336
Sales rank: 2,254
Product dimensions: 5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), which was made into a film directed by Roberto Faenza, Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), adapted by Mario Martone, and The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), soon to be a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. She is also the author of Incidental Inventions (Europa, 2019), illustrated by Andrea Ucini, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (Europa, 2016) and a children’s picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night (Europa, 2016). The four volumes known as the “Neapolitan quartet” (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child) were published by Europa Editions in English between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher


Praise for Elena Ferrante and The Neapolitan Novels

“Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Ferrante’s novels are intensely, violently personal, and because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader.” —James Wood, The New Yorker
 
“One of the more nuanced portraits of feminine friendship in recent memory.” —Megan O’Grady, Vogue
 
“Amazing! My Brilliant Friend took my breath away. If I were president of the world I would make everyone read this book. It is so honest and right and opens up heart to so much. Reading Ferrante reminded me of that child-like excitement when you can’t look up from the page, when your eyes seem to be popping from your head, when you think: I didn’t know books could do this!” —Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge
 
“Elena Ferrante will blow you away.” —Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones
 
 
“Ferrante’s emotional and carnal candor are so potent." —Janet Maslin, The New York Times
 
“I like the Italian writer, Elena Ferrante, a lot. I've been reading all her work and all about her.” — John Waters, actor and director
 
“"Elena Ferrante tackles girlhood and friendship with amazing force.”— Gwenyth Paltrow
 
“Elena Ferrante may be the best contemporary novelist you’ve never heard of”— The Economist
 
“[Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels] don’t merely offer a teeming vision of working-class Naples, with its cobblers and professors, communists and mobbed-up businessmen, womanizing poets and downtrodden wives; they present one of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship.” —John Powers, Fresh Air, NPR
 
“Ferrante’s freshness has nothing to do with fashion…it is imbued with the most haunting music of all, the echoes of literary history.” The New York Times Book Review
 
“Elena Ferrante’s THE STORY OF A NEW NAME, book two in her Naples series. Two words. Read it.” —Ann Hood, author of The Obituary Writer
 
“Ferrante writes with a ferocious, intimate urgency.” —Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death: A Memoir
 
The Days of Abandonment is a powerful, heartrending novel.” —Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Lowlands
 
“I am such a fan of Ferrante’s work, and have been for quite a while.” —Jennifer Gilmore, author of The Mothers
 
“No one has a voice quite like Ferrante's. Her gritty, ruthlessly frank novels roar off the page with a barbed fury, like an attack that is also a defense…Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you'll have some idea of how explosive these works are.” —John Freeman, The Australian
 
“The women’s fraught relationship and shifting fortunes are the life forces of the poignant book” — Publisher’s Weekly
 
"An engrossing, wildly original contemporary epic about the demonic power of human (and particularly female) creativity checked by the forces of history and society." The Los Angeles Review of Books
 
 

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