Elena Ferrante

A rich, intense and generous hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. This meticulous portrait of these two women is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship.

Book 1 in the Neapolitan series.

Lila has recently married and made her entrée into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighbourhood that she so often finds stifling. Love, jealousy, family, freedom, commitment, and above all friendship: these are signs under which both women live out this phase in their stories. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times too much for Elena. Yet the two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and is a source of strength in the face of life's challenges. 

Book 2 in the Neapolitan series.

Both Elena and Lila are now adults, with husbands, lovers, aging parents, and children. Their friendship has been the gravitational center of their lives. Both women fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up - a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books.

In this final novel she has returned to Naples, drawn back as if responding to the city's obscure magnetism. Lila, on the other hand, could never free herself from the city of her birth. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect the neighborhood.

The final book in the Neapolitan series.

Lila, after separating from her husband, is living with her young son in a new neighbourhood of Naples and working at a local factory. Elena has left Naples, earned a degree from an elite college, and published a novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned and fascinating interlocutors. The era, with its dramatic changes in sexual politics and social costumes, with its seemingly limitless number of new possibilities, is rendered with breathtaking vigour.

Book 3 in the Neapolitan series.