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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.

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Reviews

'The best thing I've read this year, far and away...She puts most other writing at the moment in the shade.' Richard Flanagan 'Ferrante tackles girlhood and friendship with amazing force.' -- Gwyneth Paltrow 'Read My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante-the Jane Austen of Italy.' Jeffrey Archer '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 'Beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein...[Ferrante] writes with a ferocious, intimate urgency.' San Francisco Chronicle '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 'Ferrante's fictions are fierce, unsentimental glimpses at the way a woman is constantly under threat, her identity submerged in marriage, eclipsed by motherhood, mythologised by desire. Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you'll have some idea of how explosive these works are...In My Brilliant Friend, the reclusive Ferrante does something hard but true. It goes back to the before and by looking at it clearly, with humour and warmth and rage, loves it.' Weekend Australian 'A superbly perceptive, nuanced, profound portrait of friendship between two young women in Naples in the 1950s...Rich in the detail of everyday life in a poor but proud neighbourhood, unsentimental, intimate, this is a truly memorable novel.' -- Booktopia Buzz 'Ferrante's prose is deeply passionate and detailed, crafting a story of a relationship in which suffering and joy go hand-in-hand...We may never want to be 16 again, but to go back, just for a few hours, is breathtaking. At times, you will be forced to put the book down, close your eyes, and feel the past rushing in.' Time Out Melbourne 'Ferrante bewitches with her tiny, intricately drawn world...My Brilliant Friend journeys fearlessly into some of that murkier psychological territory, where questions of individual identity are inextricable from circumstance and the ever-changing identities of others.' Melbourne Review 'The first two Neapolitan novels [My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name]...move far from contrivance, logic or respectability to ask uncomfortable questions about how we live, how we love, how we singe an existence in a deeply flawed world that expects pretty acquiescence from its women. In all their beauty, their ugliness, their devotion and deceit, these girls enchant and repulse, like life, like our very selves.' Sydney Morning Herald 'Elena Ferrante: the best angry woman writer ever!' -- John Waters 'The Neapolitan series is superb. You should buy it, read it, read it ten times more, lend your copy out, buy another one, rinse, repeat.' Salient