"Nothing quite like this has ever been published before," proclaimed The Guardian newspaper about the Neapolitan Novels in 2014. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third book in the series, was an international best seller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Its author was dubbed "one of the great novelists of our time" by the New York Times Book Review. This fourth and final installment in the series raises the bar even higher and indeed confirms Elena Ferrante as one of the world's best living storytellers.

Here is the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery uncontainable Lila. In this book, both are adults; life's great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women's friendship, examined in its every detail over the course of four books, remains the gravitational center of their lives. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which...

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L'amica geniale comincia seguendo le due protagoniste bambine, e poi adolescenti, tra le quinte di un rione miserabile della periferia napoletana, tra una folla di personaggi minori accompagnati lungo il loro percorso con attenta assiduità. L'autrice scava intanto nella natura complessa dell'amicizia tra due bambine, tra due ragazzine, tra due donne, seguendo passo passo la loro crescita individuale, il modo di influenzarsi reciprocamente, i buoni e i cattivi sentimenti che nutrono nei decenni un rapporto vero, robusto. Narra poi gli effetti dei cambiamenti che investono il rione, Napoli, l'Italia, in più di un cinquantennio, trasformando le amiche e il loro legame. E tutto ciò precipita nella pagina con l'andamento delle grandi narrazioni popolari, dense e insieme veloci, profonde e lievi, rovesciando di continuo situazioni, svelando fondi segreti dei personaggi, sommando evento a evento senza tregua, ma con la profondità e la potenza di voce a cui l'autrice ci ha abituati... Non vogliamo dirvi altro per non guastare il piacere della lettura. Torniamo invece all'inizio. Dicevamo che L'amica geniale appartiene a quel genere di libro che si vorrebbe non finisse mai. E infatti non finisce. O, per dire meglio, porta compiutamente a termine in questo primo romanzo la narrazione dell'infanzia e dell'adolescenza di Lila e di Elena, ma ci lascia sulla soglia di nuovi grandi mutamenti che stanno per sconvolgere le loro vite e il loro intensissimo rapporto. Altri romanzi arriveranno nel giro di pochi mesi, per raccontarci la giovinezza, la maturità, la vecchiaia incipiente delle due amiche.

"Nothing quite like this has ever been published before," proclaimed The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a sixty-year friendship between the brilliant and bookish Elena and the fiery, rebellious Lila with unmatched honesty and brilliance.
The four books in this novel cycle constitute a long, remarkable story, one that Vogue described as "gutsy and compulsively readable," which readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.

The Story of a New Name is an extraordinary novel about two young women, Lila and Elena, growing up in Naples in the early 1960s. At sixteen Lila marries the shopkeeper Stefano. She is filled with pleasure at her new wealth, and horror at the life she has chosen. Elena's own attempts at romance seem to be sabotaged by Lila's turbulent affairs. As she tries to plot her way out of poverty via academic and literary success, her constant anxiety is that she is just a shadow of the brilliant Lila. The sequel to My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name continues the enthralling chronicle of a friendship that is obsessive, loving, complicated, hurtful, enduring and constantly startling. It is an exhilarating reading experience. Elena Ferrante was born in Naples. She is the author of four other novels: The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, The Lost Daughter and My Brilliant Friend. She is one of Italy's most acclaimed authors. Ann Goldstein has translated Elena Ferrante's earlier novels. She is an editor at the New Yorker and a recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award. textpublishing.com.au 'Elena Ferrante will blow you away.' Alice Sebold 'Everyone should read anything with [Elena Ferrante's] name on it.' Boston Globe 'Ferrante's writing has no limits, is willing to take every thought forward to its most radical conclusion and backward to its most radical birthing.' James Wood, New Yorker

My Brilliant Friend is a ravishing, wonderfully written novel about a friendship that lasts a lifetime. The story of Elena and Lila begins in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples. The two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else, sometimes to their own detriment, as each discovers more about who she is and suffers or delights in the throes of their intense friendship. There is a piercing honesty about Ferrante's prose that makes My Brilliant Friend a compulsively readable portrait of two young women, and also the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country. Elena Ferrante was born in Naples. She is the author of three other novels: The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love and The Lost Daughter. She is one of Italy's most acclaimed authors. Ann Goldstein has translated Elena Ferrante's earlier novels. She is an editor at the New Yorker and a recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award. textpublishing.com.au 'Gutsy and compulsively readable...One of the more nuanced portraits of feminine friendship in recent memory...Ferrante wisely balances her memoir-like emotional authenticity with a wry sociological understanding of a society on the verge of dramatic change.' Vogue (US) 'Everyone should read anything with [Elena Ferrante's] name on it.' Boston Globe 'Her novels are intensely, violently personal, and because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader...[A] beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal.' James Wood, New Yorker 'Cinematic in the density of its detail.' Times Literary Supplement 'Elena Ferrante will blow you away.' Alice Sebold