My Brilliant Friend

Description

Premiering November 2018 as an HBO series. Book one in the New York Times bestselling 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," writes Entertainment Weekly. "Spectacular," says Maureen Corrigan on NPR's Fresh Air. "A large, captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman," writes James Wood in The New Yorker.   Ferrante is one of the world's great storytellers. With My Brilliant Friend she 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.  

Awards

Shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year 2015.

Reviews

'The best thing I've read this year, far and away...She puts most other writing at the moment in the shade.' Richard Flanagan 'Ferrante tackles girlhood and friendship with amazing force.' -- Gwyneth Paltrow 'Read My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante-the Jane Austen of Italy.' Jeffrey Archer 'Gutsy and compulsively readable...One of the more nuanced portraits of feminine friendship in recent memory...Ferrante wisely balances her memoir-like emotional authenticity with a wry sociological understanding of a society on the verge of dramatic change.' Vogue (US) 'Everyone should read anything with [Elena Ferrante's] name on it.' Boston Globe 'Beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein...[Ferrante] writes with a ferocious, intimate urgency.' San Francisco Chronicle 'Her novels are intensely, violently personal, and because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader...[A] beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal.' -- James Wood New Yorker 'Cinematic in the density of its detail.' Times Literary Supplement 'Elena Ferrante will blow you away.' Alice Sebold 'Ferrante's fictions are fierce, unsentimental glimpses at the way a woman is constantly under threat, her identity submerged in marriage, eclipsed by motherhood, mythologised by desire. Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you'll have some idea of how explosive these works are...In My Brilliant Friend, the reclusive Ferrante does something hard but true. It goes back to the before and by looking at it clearly, with humour and warmth and rage, loves it.' Weekend Australian 'A superbly perceptive, nuanced, profound portrait of friendship between two young women in Naples in the 1950s...Rich in the detail of everyday life in a poor but proud neighbourhood, unsentimental, intimate, this is a truly memorable novel.' -- Booktopia Buzz 'Ferrante's prose is deeply passionate and detailed, crafting a story of a relationship in which suffering and joy go hand-in-hand...We may never want to be 16 again, but to go back, just for a few hours, is breathtaking. At times, you will be forced to put the book down, close your eyes, and feel the past rushing in.' Time Out Melbourne 'Ferrante bewitches with her tiny, intricately drawn world...My Brilliant Friend journeys fearlessly into some of that murkier psychological territory, where questions of individual identity are inextricable from circumstance and the ever-changing identities of others.' Melbourne Review 'The first two Neapolitan novels [My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name]...move far from contrivance, logic or respectability to ask uncomfortable questions about how we live, how we love, how we singe an existence in a deeply flawed world that expects pretty acquiescence from its women. In all their beauty, their ugliness, their devotion and deceit, these girls enchant and repulse, like life, like our very selves.' Sydney Morning Herald 'Elena Ferrante: the best angry woman writer ever!' -- John Waters 'The Neapolitan series is superb. You should buy it, read it, read it ten times more, lend your copy out, buy another one, rinse, repeat.' Salient

Author description

Authors Bio, not available