My Brilliant Friend

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante is the novel that launched one of the most celebrated literary events of the past decade — the first volume of the Neapolitan novels, a four-book saga following the friendship of Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo from their childhood in a poor Naples neighbourhood in the 1950s through decades of extraordinary change. The friendship at the heart of the series is one of literature’s greatest: intense, competitive, loving, and shadowed by the question of what intelligence and ambition mean when you are a woman born in a world that doesn’t want you to use them. Ferrante writes with a directness and psychological depth that is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. Published by Europa Editions, My Brilliant Friend is essential for everyone and a starting point for one of the great reading experiences available in contemporary literature.