The Neapolitan Novels of Elena Ferrante

My Brilliant Friend

Book One ~ 2012

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. The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change.

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The Story of a New Name

Book Two ~ 2013

In the second book of the Neapolitan Novels series, following 2012’s acclaimed MY BRILLIANT FRIEND, the two friends, Lila and Elena, are now in their twenties. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila. Meanwhile, Elena continues her journey of self-discovery. The two young women share a complex and evolving bond that brings them close at times, and drives them apart at others. Each vacillates between hurtful disregard and profound love for the other.

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Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Book Three ~ 2014

In this third Neapolitan novel, Elena and Lila, the two girls whom readers first met in MY BRILLIANT FRIEND, have become women. Lila married at 16 and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts her marriage brought and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons.

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The Story of the Lost Child

Book Four ~ 2015

This fourth and final installment in the Neapolitan Novels series gives validation to the New York Times Book Review’s opinion of its author, Elena Ferrante, as “one of the great novelists of our time.” Here is the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both are now adults; life’s great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women’s friendship has remained the gravitational center of their lives. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up—a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos.

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