My Brilliant Friend: The International No. 1 Bestseller

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

Reviews

Praise 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." --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 "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 may be the best contemporary novelist you've never heard of."--The Economist "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 "I am such a fan of Ferrante's work, and have been for quite a while." --Jennifer Gilmore, author of The Mothers "The women's fraught relationship and shifting fortunes are the life forces of the poignant book" -- Publisher's Weekly "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 "[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 "Elena Ferrante is one of the great novelists of our time. Her voice is passionate, her view sweeping and her gaze basilisk . . . In these bold, gorgeous, relentless novels, Ferrante traces the deep connections between the political and the domestic. This is a new version of the way we live now -- one we need, one told brilliantly, by a woman."--Roxana Robinson, The New York Times Book Review "An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends Lila and Elena, Bright and passionate girls from a raucous neighborhood in world-class Naples. Ferrante writes with such aggression and unnerving psychological insight about the messy complexity of female friendship that the real world can drop away when you're reading her."--Entertainment Weekly"It's just hypnotic. I could not stop reading it or thinking about it."--Hillary Clinton "Ferrante seasons the prose with provocative perceptions not unlike the way Proust did." --Shelf Awareness "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."--Megan O'Grady, Vogue "Ferrante's writing is so unencumbered, so natural, and yet so lovely, brazen, and flush. The constancy of detail and the pacing that zips and skips then slows to a real-time crawl have an almost psychic effect, bringing you deeply into synchronicity with the discomforts and urgency of the characters' emotions. Ferrante is unlike other writers--not because she's innovative, but rather because she's unselfconscious and brutally, diligently honest."--Minna Proctor, Bookforum "Ferrante can do a woman's interior dialogue like no one else, with a ferocity that is shockingly honest, unnervingly blunt."--Booklist "The truest evocation of a complex and lifelong friendship between women I've ever read." --Emily Gould, author of Friendship "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 "Compelling, visceral and immediate . . . a riveting examination of power . . . The Neapolitan novels are a tour de force."--Jennifer Gilmore, The Los Angeles Times "Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay surpasses the rapturous storytelling of the previous titles in the Neapolitan Novels."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Ferrante's voice feels necessary. She is the Italian Alice Munro."--Mona Simpson, author of Casebook and Anywhere But Here "Elena Ferrante will blow you away."--Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones "The Days of Abandonment is a powerful, heartrending novel."--Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Lowland "The Neapolitan novel cycle is an unconditional masterpiece . . . I read all the books in a state of immersion; I was totally enthralled. There was nothing else I wanted to do except follow the lives of Lila and Lenu to the end."--Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Lowland "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, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Burgess Boys "Elena Ferrante: the best angry woman writer ever!"--John Waters, director "The feverish speculation about the identity of Elena Ferrante betrays an understandable failure of imagination: it seems impossible that right now somewhere someone sits in a room and draws up these books. Palatial and heartbreaking beyond measure, the Neapolitan novels seem less written than they do revealed. One simply surrenders. When the final volume appears--may that day never come!--they're bound to be acknowledged as one of the most powerful works of art, in any medium, of our age."--Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction "Ferrante tackles girlhood and friendship with amazing force."--Gwyneth Paltrow, actor "Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name. Book two in her Naples trilogy. Two words: Read it."--Ann Hood, writer (from Twitter) "Ferrante continues to imbue this growing saga with great magic."--Booklist(starred review) "One of Italy's best contemporary novelists."--The Seattle Times "Ferrante's emotional and carnal candor are so potent."--Janet Maslin, The New York Times "Elena Ferrante's gutsy and compulsively readable new novel, the first of a quartet, is a terrific entry point for Americans unfamiliar with the famously reclusive writer, whose go-for-broke tales of women's shadow selves--those ambivalent mothers and seething divorcees too complex or unseemly for polite society (and most literary fiction, for that matter)--shimmer with Balzacian human detail and subtle psychological suspense . . . The Neapolitan novels offer one of the more nuanced portraits of feminine friendship in recent memory--from the make-up and break-up quarrels of young girls to the way in which we carefully define ourselves against each other as teens--Ferrante wisely balances her memoir-like emotional authenticity with a wry sociological understanding of a society on the verge of dramatic change." --Megan O'Grady, Vogue "My Brilliant Friend is a sweeping family-centered epic that encompasses issues of loyalty, love, and a transforming Europe. This gorgeous novel should bring a host of new readers to one of Italy's most acclaimed authors."--The Barnes and Noble Review "Ferrante draws an indelible picture of the city's mean streets and the poverty, violence and sameness of lives lived in the same place forever . . . She is a fierce writer."--Shelf Awareness "Ferrante transforms the love, separation and reunion of two poor urban girls into the general tragedy of their city."--The New York Times "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 mining fury."--Susanna Sonnenberg, The San Francisco Chronicle "Everyone should read anything with Ferrante's name on it."--The Boston Globe "The through-line in all of Ferrante's investigations, for me, is nothing less than one long, mind-and-heart-shredding howl for the history of women (not only Neapolitan women), and its implicit j'accuse . . . Ferrante's effect, critics agree, is inarguable. 'Intensely, violently personal' and 'brutal directness, familial torment' is how James Wood ventures to categorize her--descriptions that seem mild after you've encountered the work." --Joan Frank, The San Francisco Chronicle "Lila, mercurial, unsparing, and, at the end of this first episode in a planned trilogy from Ferrante, seemingly capable of starting a full-scale neighborhood war, is a memorable character."--Publishers 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 "Ferrante's own writing has no limits, is willing to take every thought forward to its most radical conclusion and backwards to its most radical birthing."---The New Yorker The United Kingdom "The Story of a New Name, like its predecessor, is fiction of the very highest order."--Independent on Sunday "My Brilliant Friend, translated by Ann Goldstein, is stunning: an intense, forensic exploration of the friendship between Lila and the story's narrator, Elena. Ferrante's evocation of the working-class district of Naples where Elena and Lila first meet

Author Bio

Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), and the four novels 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) which were published by Europa Editions between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018. Ferrante is also the author of Frantumaglia: A Writers Journey (Europa, 2016), a childrens picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night (Europa, 2016), and a collection of personal essays illustrated by Andrea Ucini entitled Incidental Inventions (Europa, 2019). The Lost Daughter was made into a feature film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman. Her most recent novel is The Lying Life of Adults (Europa, 2020). In the Margins, a collection of original essays on reading and writing, was published by Europa in 2022. Ann Goldstein is one of the most accomplished translators from the Italian working today. Best known for her translations of Elena Ferrantes oeuvre, she has also brought to Anglo-Saxon readers novels by Primo Levi, Pierpaolo Pasolini, Alessandro Baricco and other classic and contemporary Italian writers.