My Brilliant Friend
by Elena Ferrante
Two girls in Naples. One escapes. Neither is free.
For you if
you've had a friendship so intense it felt like a rivalry and a love affair simultaneously
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Elena and Lila grow up in a violent, suffocating Naples neighborhood in the 1950s. One gets out through education. One stays and becomes something fiercer and stranger. Ferrante uses their friendship to dispatch from inside the specific texture of Italian working-class life — the neighborhood as a system of control, the family as a trap, female ambition as something the world will punish you for. The first of four novels. You will read all of them. Naples as a place that gets into your blood and won't come out.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Italy • Europe
- Voice
- Written by a Italian author
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