“This is a story about friendship as a mass of roiling currents—love, envy, pity, spite, dependency and Schadenfreude coiling around one another, tricky to untangle.”
—Intelligent Life
“Elena Ferrante may be the best contemporary novelist you have never heard of. The Italian author has written six lavishly praised novels. But she writes under a pseudonym and will not offer herself for public consumption. Her characters likewise defy convention . . . Her prose is crystal, and her storytelling both visceral and compelling.”
—The Economist
FROM ITALY
“Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay evokes the vital flux of a heartbeat, of blood flowing through our veins.”
—La Repubblica
“We don’t know who she is, but it doesn’t matter. Ferrante’s books are enthralling self-contained monoliths that do not seek friendship but demand silent, fervid admiration from her passionate readers . . . The thing most real in these novels is the intense, almost osmotic relationship that unites Elena and Lila, the two girls from a neighborhood in Naples who are the peerless protagonists of the Neapolitan novels.”
—Famiglia Cristiana
“Today it is near impossible to find writers capable of bringing smells, tastes, feelings, and contradictory passions to their pages. Elena Ferrante, alone, seems able to do it. There is no writer better suited to composing the great Italian novel of her generation, her country, and her time.”
—Il Manifesto
“Regardless of who is behind the name Elena Ferrante, the mysterious pseudonym used by the author of the Neapolitan novels, two things are certain: she is a woman and she knows how to describe Naples like nobody else. She does so with a style that recalls an enchanted spider web with its expressive power and the wizardry with which it creates an entire world.”
—Huffington Post (Italy)
“A marvel that is without limits and beyond genre.”
—Il Salvagente
“Elena Ferrante is proving that literature can cure our present ills; it can cure the spirit by operating as an antidote to the nervous attempts we make to see ourselves reflected in the present-day of a country that is increasingly repellent.”
—Il Mattino
“My Brilliant Friend flows from the soul like an eruption from Mount Vesuvius.”
—La Repubblica
FROM AUSTRALIA
“No one has a voice quite like Ferrante’s. Her gritty, ruthlessly frank novels roar off the page with a barbed fury, like an attack that is also a defense . . . 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.”
—John Freeman, The Australian
“One of the most astounding—and mysterious—contemporary Italian novelists available in translation, Elena Ferrante unfolds the tumultuous inner lives of women in her thrillingly menacing stories of lost love, negligent mothers and unfulfilled desires.”
—The Age
“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.”
—The Melbourne Review
“The Neapolitan novels 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.”
—The Sydney Morning Herald
FROM SPAIN
“Elena Ferrante’s female characters are genuine works of art . . . It is clear that her novel is the child of Italian neorealism and an abiding fascination with scene.”
—El Pais
M
Y
B
RILLIANT
F
RIEND
I
NDEX OF
C
HARACTERS
The Cerullo family (the shoemaker’s family):
Fernando Cerullo, shoemaker.
Nunzia Cerullo, wife of Fernando and Lila’s mother.
Raffaella Cerullo, called Lina, and by Elena Lila.
Rino Cerullo, Lila’s older brother, also a shoemaker.
Rino, also the name of one of Lila’s children.
Other children.
The Greco family (the porter’s family):
Elena Greco, called Lenuccia or Lenù. She is the oldest, and after her are Peppe, Gianni, and Elisa.
The father is a porter at the city hall.
The mother is a housewife.
The Carracci family (Don Achille’s family):
Don Achille Carracci, the ogre of fairy tales.
Maria Carracci, wife of Don Achille.
Stefano Carracci, son of Don Achille, grocer in the family store.
Pinuccia and Alfonso Carracci, Don Achille’s two other children.
The Peluso family (the carpenter’s family):
Alfredo Peluso, carpenter.
Giuseppina Peluso, wife of Alfredo.
Pasquale Peluso, older son of Alfredo and Giuseppina, construction worker.
Carmela Peluso, who is also called Carmen, sister of Pasquale, salesclerk in a dry-goods store.
Other children.
The Cappuccio family (the mad widow’s family):
Melina, a relative of Lila’s mother, a mad widow.
Melina’s husband, who unloaded crates at the fruit and vegetable market.
Ada Cappuccio, Melina’s daughter.
Antonio Cappuccio, her brother, a mechanic.
Other children.
The Sarratore family (the railroad worker poet’s family):
Donato Sarratore, conductor.
Lidia Sarratore, wife of Donato.
Nino Sarratore, the oldest of the five children of Donato and Lidia.
Marisa Sarratore, daughter of Donato and Lidia.
Pino, Clelia, and Ciro Sarratore, younger children of Donato and Lidia.
The Scanno family (the fruit and vegetable seller’s family):
Nicola Scanno, fruit and vegetable seller.
Assunta Scanno, wife of Nicola.