My Brilliant Friend

Beginning in the 1950s Elena and Lila grow up in Naples, Italy, mirroring two different aspects of their nation.

Zusatztext 43063982 Informationen zum Autor Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), which was made into a film directed by Roberto Faenza, Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), adapted by Mario Martone, and The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), soon to be a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. She is also the author of Incidental Inventions (Europa, 2019), illustrated by Andrea Ucini, Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey (Europa, 2016) and a children's picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night (Europa, 2016). The four volumes known as the "Neapolitan quartet" (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child) were published by Europa Editions in English between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018. Klappentext A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, this rich, intense, and generous-hearted story gives a meticulous portrait of two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Zusammenfassung Now an HBO series: the first volume in the New York Times -bestselling "enduring masterpiece" about a lifelong friendship between two women from Naples ( The Atlantic ). Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples! Elena Ferrante's four-volume story spans almost sixty years! as its main characters! the fiery and unforgettable Lila and the bookish narrator! Elena! become women! wives! mothers! and leaders! all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflicted friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence. Through the lives of these two women! Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood! a city! and a country as it is transformed in ways that! in turn! also transform the relationship between two women. "An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends." - Entertainment Weekly "Spectacular." -Maureen Corrigan! NPR's Fresh Air "Captivating." - The New Yorker ...

Praise for Elena Ferrante and The Neapolitan Novels

The United States

“Ferrante’s novels are intensely, violently personal, and because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader.”
—James Wood, The New Yorker
 
“One of the more nuanced portraits of feminine friendship in recent memory.”
—Megan O’Grady, Vogue
 
“Amazing! My Brilliant Friend took my breath away. If I were president of the world I would make everyone read this book. It is so honest and right and opens up heart to so much. Reading Ferrante reminded me of that child-like excitement when you can’t look up from the page, when your eyes seem to be popping from your head, when you think: I didn’t know books could do this!”
—Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge
 
“I like the Italian writer, Elena Ferrante, a lot. I've been reading all her work and all about her.” — John Waters, actor and director
 
“Elena Ferrante may be the best contemporary novelist you’ve never heard of.”
—The Economist
 
“Ferrante’s freshness has nothing to do with fashion…it is imbued with the most haunting music of all, the echoes of literary history.”
—The New York Times Book Review
 
“I am such a fan of Ferrante’s work, and have been for quite a while.”
—Jennifer Gilmore, author of The Mothers
 
“The women’s fraught relationship and shifting fortunes are the life forces of the poignant book” — Publisher’s Weekly
 
“When I read [the Neapolitan novels] I find that I never want to stop. I feel vexed by the obstacles—my job, or acquaintances on the subway—that threaten to keep me apart from the books. I mourn separations (a year until the next one—how?). I am propelled by a ravenous will to keep going.”*
—Molly Fischer, The New Yorker*

“[Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels] don’t merely offer a teeming vision of working-class Naples, with its cobblers and professors, communists and mobbed-up businessmen, womanizing poets and downtrodden wives; they present one of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship.” *
—John Powers, Fresh Air, NPR
 
“Elena Ferrante is one of the great novelists of our time. Her voice is passionate, her view sweeping and her gaze basilisk . . . In these bold, gorgeous, relentless novels, Ferrante traces the deep connections between the political and the domestic. This is a new version of the way we live now — one we need, one told brilliantly, by a woman.”
—*Roxana Robinson, The New York Times Book Review
 
“An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends Lila and Elena, Bright and passionate girls from a raucous neighborhood in world-class Naples. Ferrante writes with such aggression  and unnerving psychological insight about the messy complexity of female friendship that the real world can drop away when you’re reading her.”*
—Entertainment Weekly
*
"It's just hypnotic. I could not stop reading it or thinking about it."
—Hillary Clinton*
 
“Ferrante seasons the prose with provocative perceptions not unlike the way Proust did.”
—*Shelf Awareness
 
“It would be difficult to find a deeper portrait of women’s friendship than the one in Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, which unfold from the fifties to the twenty-first century to tell a single story with
the possessive force of an origin myth.”
—Megan O’Grady*, Vogue 
 
“Ferrante’s writing is so unencumbered, so natural, and yet so lovely, brazen, and flush. The constancy of detail and the pacing that zips and skips then slows to a real-time crawl have an almost psychic effect, bringing you deeply into synchronicity with the discomforts and urgency of the characters’ emotions. Ferrante is unlike other writers—not because she’s innovative, but rather because she’s unselfconscious and brutally, diligently honest.”
—*Minna Proctor*, Bookforum
 
“Ferrante can do a woman’s interior dialogue like no one else, with a ferocity that is shockingly honest, unnervingly blunt.”
—*Booklist
 
“The truest evocation of a complex and lifelong friendship between women I’ve ever read.” *
—Emily Gould,* author of Friendship
 
“Elena Ferrante is the author of several remarkable, lucid, austerely honest novels . . . My Brilliant Friend is a large, captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman.”*
—James Wood, The New Yorker
 
“Compelling, visceral and immediate . . . a riveting examination of power . . . The Neapolitan novels are a tour de force.”
—*Jennifer Gilmore*, The Los Angeles Times
 *
“Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay surpasses the rapturous storytelling of the previous titles in the Neapolitan Nove…