Italian
Man Booker International Prize longlist; multiple awards across Europe
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist whose Neapolitan series — beginning with My Brilliant Friend — is among the most celebrated fiction of the 21st century.
Elena Ferrante publishes under a pseudonym and has maintained strict anonymity throughout her career, declining all interviews, photographs, and public appearances. This refusal has generated substantial media speculation — some of it intrusive — but it has also kept the focus squarely on her work, which is where it belongs. The Neapolitan Novels — My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child — follow Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo from childhood in postwar Naples through old age, mapping sixty years of Italian history through the prism of one of literature’s most complex female friendships.
What makes the series exceptional is its refusal of sentimentality about women’s lives, friendship, or ambition. Ferrante writes about female interiority with a directness that can feel almost shocking — the jealousy, desire, resentment, and love that Elena and Lila feel toward each other are rendered with an honesty that most writers avoid. The Naples of the novels is specific and visceral, but the questions the books ask — about who gets to escape poverty, who gets to become themselves, what women owe each other — are universal. My Brilliant Friend works as an entry point, but the series rewards reading in full.
Ferrante’s earlier novels, including The Days of Abandonment and Troubling Love, are darker and more compressed, and equally accomplished. Critics occasionally note that the Neapolitan series’s later volumes lose some narrative momentum, but this is a minor charge against what is, collectively, one of the most sustained and ambitious fictional projects of the past thirty years. Ferrante is a writer of the first rank.
by Elena Ferrante
The final volume: Elena and Lila return to Naples in middle age, their friendship tested by a final, devastating loss as the neighbourhood that made them both begins to dissolve.
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by Elena Ferrante
Elena Greco narrates her lifelong friendship with the brilliant, volatile Lila Cerullo, beginning in their postwar Naples neighborhood and following both girls through childhood and into their teenage years.
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by Elena Ferrante
The second Neapolitan novel follows Lila into her disastrous marriage and Elena through her university entrance exams and early years of higher education, as their friendship navigates the widening gap of their diverging lives.
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by Elena Ferrante
Elena pursues academic success and marriage while Lila works in brutal factory conditions; their lives diverge further as political upheaval grips 1970s Naples.
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by Elena Ferrante
Olga's husband of fifteen years announces he is leaving her for a younger woman. The novel follows the weeks that follow — the rage, the dissolution, the terrifying loss of self that abandonment can produce in someone whose identity was built around a partnership. Ferrante's most concentrated and most visceral novel.
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by Elena Ferrante
Leda, a middle-aged professor, takes a solo holiday on the Ionian coast and becomes obsessed with a young mother and her daughter on the beach — an obsession that forces her to confront the choices she made as a young mother herself. A novella about maternal ambivalence, guilt, and the parts of ourselves we cannot reconcile.
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The best Italian literature — from My Brilliant Friend and The Name of the Rose to Germinal. Essential Italian novels and the canonical reading list for Italian fiction.
guide
Where to start with Elena Ferrante — whether to begin with My Brilliant Friend, The Days of Abandonment, or the Neapolitan Quartet. A complete reading guide.
guide
The complete Elena Ferrante reading guide — the Neapolitan Novels quartet in order, standalone novels, and how to approach the anonymous Italian author's full catalog.
Yes — the Neapolitan Novels must be read in order: My Brilliant Friend (2011), The Story of a New Name (2012), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013), The Story of the Lost Child (2014). They are a continuous narrative following Lenu and Lila from childhood to old age. Reading out of order makes no sense.
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym for an Italian author whose real identity is unconfirmed. An investigation by Claudio Gatti in 2016 suggested the author is Anita raja, a translator, but this has not been confirmed. Ferrante has consistently declined to reveal their identity, arguing that books should be assessed independently of their author.
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