A Reading Guide to the Works of Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante’s novels have earned her a reputation as one of the most significant writers working in Italy today, with a readership that extends far beyond it. Her fiction returns repeatedly to Naples, to the bonds and betrayals between women, and to the question of how a person can lay claim to a life of her own.

The Neapolitan Quartet

The four novels that brought Ferrante international recognition trace a friendship across more than four decades, beginning in the 1950s and unfolding against the shifting political landscape of post-war Italy. Together they explore womanhood, friendship, class and politics through the lives of two women from a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples.

My Brilliant Friend

The first book introduces Lila and Lenù as schoolgirls. Their friendship, rendered with meticulous attention, becomes a shelter from hardship — though not always a reliable or perfect one.

The Story of a New Name

The second volume follows Lila into married life while Lenù continues her studies and ventures beyond the neighbourhood. Love, jealousy, family and commitment shape this phase of both women’s stories. Marriage appears to imprison Lila, while the pressure to excel weighs heavily on Lenù.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, amid dramatic shifts in sexual politics and social norms, the third book finds Lenù a graduate of an elite college and a successful writer, with previously unimaginable opportunities opening to her. Lila, separated from her husband, fights to build a new life while reckoning with her unfulfilled potential.

The Story of the Lost Child

The finale sees Lila and Lenù as adults with husbands, lovers and children. Lenù has made her life in Florence, but this volume brings her back to Naples, answering the city’s obscure pull. Lila, now a successful entrepreneur, contends with the chauvinism and criminal violence that infect the neighbourhood. Through all the struggles and turning points, the friendship remains the gravitational centre of both women’s lives.

Standalone Novels

Troubling Love

Ferrante’s first novel is a short, urgent search for family truths. After her mother’s untimely death, Delia sets out through the chaotic streets of Naples to reconcile her mother’s blurred past with the mysterious events surrounding her death. Confronting the possibility that her mother was not the person she believed her to be, Delia untangles a web of secrets.

The Days of Abandonment

Ferrante’s second novel, and the first of her books to appear in English. After her husband leaves her, Olga descends into a dangerous freefall, confronting her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal. It is a story of destruction and survival, as poignant as it is unforgettable.

The Lost Daughter

Ferrante’s third novel became an Oscar-nominated film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman. When Leda’s daughters leave home, she expects loneliness; instead she feels liberated. A coastal escape takes a menacing turn as a series of encounters forces her to face memories of difficult, unconventional choices that shaped her as a woman and a mother. What begins as a serene tale of rediscovery becomes a ferocious exploration of womanhood, motherhood and the conflicting emotions that tie us to our children.

The Lying Life of Adults

First published in 2020, Ferrante’s most recent novel was adapted as a Netflix series. Set in a divided Naples, it offers a powerful portrait of Giovanna’s passage from childhood to adolescence in the 1990s, and of her search for identity, damaged family bonds, and a life she can claim as her own.

Non-Fiction

In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

A collection of four original essays offering rare insight into Ferrante’s formation as a writer and her life as a reader. She warns of the perils of “bad language” — historically alien to the truth of women — and advocates a collective fusion of female talent, while discussing the work of authors she loves.

Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey

Letters, essays, reflections and interviews gathered over twenty years. Ferrante addresses her choice to stand aside and let her books live autonomous lives, explains the joys and struggles of writing, and contemplates her relationships with the cities she has lived in, with motherhood, with feminism and with her childhood.

Incidental Inventions

Ferrante’s columns for The Guardian, collected together for the first time, with a new introduction by the author and illustrations by Andrea Ucini.

Illustrated Fiction

The Beach at Night

A short, moving and mysterious tale for both future and present readers of Ferrante’s novels.