My Brilliant Friend · The Neapolitan Novels, Book One

Dear readers, try reading this book and you'll wish it would never end.
With her new novel, Elena Ferrante surprises and unsettles us once again, offering a sweeping narrative that we surrender to with the same comfort and intense engagement as a pleasant journey, where the farther the destination, the better. The author leaves behind small, dense private stories to devote herself to a vast writing project that chronicles a female friendship—that between Lila Cerullo and Elena Greco—from their childhood in Naples in the 1950s to the present day.

My Brilliant Friend begins by following the two protagonists as children, then as teenagers, against the backdrop of a impoverished neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, surrounded by a cast of secondary characters whose journeys are traced with careful consistency.
Meanwhile, the author delves into the complex nature of friendship between two girls, then two young women, and finally two adults, step by step following their individual growth, their mutual influence, and the mix of positive and negative feelings that nourish a genuine, strong bond over the decades. She then narrates the impact of changes affecting the neighborhood, Naples, and Italy over more than fifty years, transforming the friends and their relationship. All of this unfolds on the page with the rhythm of great popular narratives: dense yet fast-paced, profound yet light, constantly overturning situations, revealing characters' hidden depths, and piling event upon event without respite, but with the depth and powerful voice to which the author has accustomed us...
We won't say more, so as not to spoil the pleasure of reading.

As we said, My Brilliant Friend belongs to that category of books you wish would never end. And indeed, it doesn't. Or rather, this first novel fully completes the narration of Lila and Elena's childhood and adolescence, but leaves us on the threshold of major upheavals about to disrupt their lives and their intensely close relationship. The story continues in subsequent volumes, recounting the friends' youth, maturity, and early old age.

So let's enjoy this other hallmark of the true reader: the pleasure savored and then prolonged, the anticipation of what comes next, and the hope, amid today's many bitternesses, for a little sweetness in the near future.

Happy reading,
The Publishers
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