My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels Series #1) by Elena Ferrante

5 (5)
$19.00

Product details

Web ID: 1538500
Now an HBO series- the first volume in the New York Times–bestselling enduring masterpiece about a lifelong friendship between two women from Naples (The Atlantic). Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante's four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its main characters, the fiery and unforgettable Lila and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflicted friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between two women. An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends. —Entertainment Weekly Spectacular. —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air Captivating. —The New Yorker.
  • Product Features

    • Suggested age range- Adult
    • Format- Paperback
    • Product dimensions- 5.3" W x 8.2" H x 1.3" D
    • Genre- Fiction
    • Publisher- Europa Editions, Incorporated, Publication date- 09-25-2012
    • Page count- 336
    • ISBN- 9781609450786
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Ratings & Reviews

5/5

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5 reviews
MonicaQ
10 months ago
from Manhattan

Guilty pleasure through and through

This is a beach read that is so compelling it makes you forget to dip into the calling ocean. It's a book about rivalry between two poor, brilliant girls who grow up together as neighbors and besties. It became a Netflix series, quite good, but not as gripping and fast paced as the writing of this novel. Highly recommended for fans of emotionally wrought love affairs.

Customer review from barnesandnoble.com

OceanG
1 year ago

a gift for all your childhood friends

This is a wonderful gift for any or all of your childhood friends or siblings with whom you laughed your hearts out, felt fear or dread together, and grown up with and apart from. It's a marvelous narrative of friendship and how culture and families shape us. It's set in Naples. Gripping for the emotional details of rivalry. Loved it.

Recommends this product

Customer review from barnesandnoble.com

Anabanana
3 years ago
from California

captivating story

one of my favorite books ever

Recommends this product

Customer review from barnesandnoble.com

Alans
3 years ago
from Virginia

Beautiful realism

My Brilliant Friend is the first novel in a tetralogy by Italian author Elena Ferrante. The tetralogy, known as the Neapolitan Novels, is a raging international success. This first novel can stand alone and is better approached that way. It is excellent, a story of growing up impoverished in Naples, Italy, in vivid convincing interesting detail. The narrative centers on a difficult, strong, lasting friendship between two girls (in childhood and adolescence). The five-star rating I am giving My Brilliant Friend only applies to that first book of the quartet, definitely not to the rest of the tetralogy. I also read the fourth book, The Story of the Lost Child, and it is very poor, overflowing with soap opera emotional ups and downs. It is about the same friends, over roughly 30 years of adulthood, bad marriages, bad lovers, redundant shouting arguments, disappointments in life, really tiresome. I would give that fourth book only a one-star rating.

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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com

Sandilla
3 years ago
from Pomona

Favorite book ever

When u grow up lower or middle class. This book will hit home. Loved it.

Recommends this product

Customer review from barnesandnoble.com