My Brilliant Friend: 01 (Neapolitan Novels) - Softcover

SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2015

&quotThere is a savage honesty to the work of Elena Ferrante that is both unsettling and comforting at once. Here is an author who has poured every ounce of herself onto the page." - The Irish Times

"I can really think of no better praise than to simply say I loved it, though that seems inadequate commendation for such a supremely talented author." - Book Reporter

&quotI wish I'd published Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. I've been recommending these to everyone I know since I read the first book, My Brilliant Friend, at the beginning of 2014. When the third book came out in September I had to put aside all submissions for a few days to continue the saga. These feminist novels are the best modern portrait of a female friendship I've come across in literature. I'm impatient for the fourth and final book which is out in autumn 2015." - Adam Freudenheim from Pushkin Press writing in The Guardian

&quotHer novels are intensely, violently personal, and because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader." - The New Yorker

&quotFerrante, beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein...writes with a ferocious, intimate urgency." - San Francisco Chronicle

&quotCinematic in the density of its detail." --Times Literary Supplement

"I'm so impressed by what seems like a rare ability to put on paper insights into poverty, envy, money, girlhood, corruption, and community, and the way in which these factors impact our lives and options. As a record of working class female experience and associated pressures, it feels powerful, fresh, and important, unlike anything I've read before. It's also so utterly readable, told in the recounting of domestic, everyday episodes." --TYCI

&quotFerrante's remarkable achievement so far is to combine the &quotlarge, loose, baggy monster" mode of novel and feminist polemic, without killing the appeal of the first or the force of the second... The Neapolitan series so far is a masterclass in how to take off a mask and be oneself behind a barrier of one's own making." - New Humanist

&quot1950s Naples is vividly and evocatively portrayed....[the novel is] sharp and honest and pulsating with life...I really recommend this book, and I'm thrilled to read that this is part one of a trilogy."Tolstoy is my cat

&quotAn enthralling reading experience, reminiscent of those childhood immersions in a story that turn the volume of the real world down to a whisper. It impressed and delighted me and it was powerful enough to make me revoke my decision not to do any more book reviewing on this blog because I simply had to let you know about it... Ferrante shows us the levers working the vice that warps and crushes the human soul." - A Year of Reading the World

&quotOur bestselling title this Christmas. 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." - London Review Bookshop

&quotIf you haven t read Elena Ferrante, it's like not having read Flaubert in 1856...Incontrovertibly brilliant." - Anne Meadows, Granta

"...these delicious novels are some of the best I have ever read. A vivid portrait of female friendship sweeps from childhood in the back streets of impoverished Naples during the 1950s through the Twentieth Century and their love affairs, marriages, motherhood. Passionate, intense, full of suspense and cinematic detail, these astonishing novels will keep you gripped throughout the summer." -- Kate Figes, The Daily Mail

"Her novels, whether in Italian or in English, are irresistible - less like sugar is irresistible, and more like pain is irresistible." --Arcade

"People don't merely read Elena Ferrante's novels. They devour them in all-night binges." --Esquire's 80 Books Every Person Should Read

"Our bestselling title this Christmas. 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." - A London Review Bookshop Book of the Day

&quotIf you haven t read Elena Ferrante, it's like not having read Flaubert in 1856...Incontrovertibly brilliant." - Anne Meadows, editor at Granta

&quotThe four novels (the first is _My Brilliant Friend_; the last is out here in September) have become the publishing story of the decade...Ferrante is that rare gem, a novelist with impeccable literary credentials who also spins a good yarn - and who sells." - The Sunday Times Culture (Cover Story)

&quotI simply have not read anything like this before. It sounds so simple and restricted in nature but Ferrante, like her two protagonists, breaks every barrier with her impassioned, complex and honest narrative...I cannot recommend this book enough." - Franny and Perks

"One of the most iconic sagas in a generation... These novels are genuine page-turners; fast-paced, filmic, vividly alive with the sweat and dust of 1950s Naples." --Waterstones
&quotThis novel has so much going for it. The prose is very straightfoward and easy to read. The characters are incredibly rich: forever surprising you, full of mystery and contradictions." --Never Stop Reading

Elena Ferrante was born in Naples. She is the author of The Days of Abandonment, which the NewYork Times called &quotstunning", Troubling Love, The Lost Daughter and the critically acclaimed Neopolitan Novels, which include My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child, published in September 2015. Though one of Italy's most important contemporary authors, she has successfully shunned public attention and kept her true identity concealed.