Named as no.1 in the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Times.

From one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors, comes this ravishing and generous-hearted novel about a friendship that lasts a lifetime.

The story of Elena and Lila begins in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else, as their friendship, beautifully and meticulously rendered, becomes a not always perfect shelter from hardship.

Ferrante has created a memorable portrait of two women, but My Brilliant Friend is also the story of a nation.

Through the lives of Elena and Lila, Ferrante gives her readers the story of a city and a country undergoing momentous change.

Out running an errand, Valeria Cossati gives in to a sudden impulse - she buys a shiny black notebook. She starts keeping a diary in secret, recording her concerns about her daughter, the constant churn of the domestic routine and her fears that her husband will discover her new habit. With each entry Valeria plunges deeper into her interior life, uncovering profound dissatisfaction and restlessness. As she finds her own voice, the roles that have come to define her-as wife, as mother, as daughter-begin to break apart. Forbidden Notebook is a rediscovered jewel of Italian literature, published here in a new translation by the celebrated Ann Goldstein and with a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri. A captivating feminist classic, it is an intimate, haunting story of domestic discontent in postwar Rome, and of one woman's awakening to her true thoughts and desires.

“Nothing quite like this has ever been published before,” proclaimed The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two women with unmatched honesty and brilliance.

The Story of the Lost Child is the concluding volume in the dazzling saga of two women― the brilliant, bookish Elena, and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both 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. Proximity to the world she has always rejected only brings her role as its unacknowledged leader into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable.

The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.

Set in the late 1960s and the 1970s, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay continues the story of the feisty and rebellious Lina and her lifelong friend, the brilliant and bookish Elena. Lina, after separating from her husband, is living with her young son in a new neighborhood 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 vigor. This third Neapolitan Novel is not only a moving story of friendship but also a searing portrait of a rapidly changing world.

Since the publication of My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante’s fame as one of today’s most compelling, insightful, and stylish authors has grown. She has gained admirers among authors, artists, and critics. But her most resounding success has undoubtedly been with readers, who have discovered in Ferrante a writer who speaks with great power and beauty of the mysteries of belonging, human relationships, love, family, and friendship.

The debut novel from the author of My Brilliant Friend in a brand-new edition Following her mother's untimely death, Delia sets off on a breath-taking odyssey through the chaotic, suffocating streets of her native Naples in search of the truth about her family. Reality is buried in the fertile soil of memory, and Delia digs deep to reconcile the past with the mysterious events leading up to her mother's death. Spurred by a series of anonymous phone calls, Delia reconstructs her mother's final days and with every new discovery must face the possibility that her mother was not at all the person Delia believed her to be. To learn the truth and to untangle the knot of lies, passions and memories that bind mother and daughter, Delia must return to the Naples of her childhood.

A NEW EDITION TO TIE IN WITH THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED FILM DIRECTED BY MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL, STARRING OLIVIA COLMAN, DAKOTA JOHNSON AND PAUL MESCAL From the international bestselling author of MY BRILLIANT FRIEND Leda is devoted to her work as an English teacher and to her two children. When her daughters leave home to be with their father in Canada, Leda anticipates a period of loneliness and longing. Instead, slightly embarrassed by the sensation, she feels liberated, as if her life has become lighter, easier. She decides to take a holiday by the sea, in a small coastal town in southern Italy. But after a few days of calm and quiet, things begin to take a menacing turn. Leda encounters a family whose brash presence proves unsettling, at times even threatening. When a small, apparently meaningless, event occurs, Leda is overwhelmed by memories of the difficult and unconventional choices she made as a mother and their consequences for herself and her family. The seemingly serene tale of a woman's pleasant rediscovery of herself soon becomes the story of a ferocious confrontation with an unsettled past. The Lost Daughter is a compelling and perceptive meditation on womanhood and motherhood, exploring the conflicting emotions that tie us to our children. 18M copies of Elena Ferrante's books sold worldwide

The Story of a New Name, the second book of the Neapolitan Quartet, picks up the story where My Brilliant Friend left off.

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.

In the Neapolitan Quartet, Elena Ferrante gives readers a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging.

"AN INCENDIARY PORTRAIT OF THE VOLCANIC CURRENTS OF SEX AND BETRAYAL."-Mail on Sunday THE INTERNATIONAL No. 1 BESTSELLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF MY BRILLIANT FRIEND A BBC2 Between The Covers Book Club Pick BRITISH BOOK AWARDS 2021 - SHORTLISTED FOR FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR Soon to be a NETFLIX original series 18M OF ELENA FERRANTE'S BOOKS SLOD WORLDWIDE Giovanna's pretty face has changed: it's turning into the face of an ugly, spiteful adolescent. But is she seeing things as they really are? Where must she look to find her true reflection and a life she can claim as her own? Giovanna's search leads her to two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: the Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and the Naples of the depths, a place of excess and vulgarity. Adrift, she vacillates between these two cities, falling into one then climbing back to the other. Set in a divided Naples, The Lying Life of Adults is a singular portrayal of the transition from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER "This is no amiable coming-of-age tale... the most intense writing about the experiences and interior life of a girl on the cusp of adulthood that I have ever read. It is brilliant."-The Financial Times "An astonishing, deeply moving tale."-The Guardian "Ferrante confronts female sexual awakening with such an absence of romantic enchantment it leaves you gasping."-The Daily Mail WHAT READERS ARE SAYING: "Brilliant as always."-Jan on Amazon "A tightly crafted and gripping story."-Maxwell on Goodreads "Excellent book. My only complaint was that it ended too soon!"-Mhairi on Amazon "I woke up eagerly looking forward to reading more of this novel every single day."-Violet on Goodreads "Fans of Elena Ferrante will not be disappointed."-Lesley on Amazon

"Elena Ferrante has established herself as the foremost writer in Italy - and the world." THE SUNDAY TIMES A delightful collection of original essays on reading and writing. From the internationally acclaimed author of My Brilliant Friend, The Lying Life of Adults, and The Lost Daughter, come four revelatory pieces offering rare insight into the author's formation as a writer and life as a reader. Ferrante warns us of the perils of "bad language"-historically alien to the truth of women-and advocates for a collective fusion of female talent as she brilliantly discourses on the work of her most beloved authors. A delightful collection of essays exploring reading and writing from the internationally acclaimed author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lying Life of Adults. Ferrante's writing has been described as compulsive (The Times) and astonishing (Guardian), her novels have sold millions and been translated into many languages as well as adapted for TV internationally.

For fans of Truman Capote and Emmanuel Carrere In March 2016, in an apartment on the outskirts of Rome, two “ordinary� young men brutally tortured and murdered twenty-two-year-old Luca Varani. News of the seemingly inexplicable crime sent shockwaves across Rome and beyond. After the crime comes to light, Lagioia begins investigating the crime by meeting with the victim’s family and corresponding with one of the killers. It soon becomes clear, however, that to investigate this crime means to descend into the darkest corners of Rome and of the human psyche.  Lagioia leads us through a maze of betrayed expectations, sexual confusion, economic grievances and identity crises to locate the breaking point, the point after which anything is possible. Sharp, hypnotic, devastating, The City of The Living is not just the story of a crime, but of human nature itself: the tension between responsibility and guilt, between the drive to oppress and the desire to be free, between who we are and who we can become.

Without warning or a word of explanation, an unnamed 13-year-old girl is sent away from the family she has always thought of as hers to live with her birth family: a large, chaotic assortment of individuals whom she has never met and who seem anything but welcoming. Thus begins a new life, one of struggle, conflict, especially between the young girl and her mother, and deprivation. But in her relationship with Adriana and Vincenzo, two of her newly acquired siblings, she will find the strength to start again and to build a new and enduring sense of self. Told with an immediacy and a rare expressive intensity that has earned it countless adoring readers and one of Italy's most prestigious literary prizes, A Girl Returned is a powerful novel rendered with sensitivity and verve by Ann Goldstein, translator of the works of Elena Ferrante. Set against the stark, beautiful landscape of Abruzzo in central Italy, this is a compelling story about mothers and daughters, about responsibility, siblings, and caregiving, pitch-perfect in Ann Goldstein's English translation.

THE BREAK-OUT NOVEL BY THE INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF MY BRILLIANT FRIEND

Rarely have the foundations upon which our ideas of motherhood and womanhood rest been so candidly questioned. This compelling novel tells the story of one woman’s headlong descent into what she calls an “absence of sense” after being abandoned by her husband. Olga’s “days of abandonment” become a desperate, dangerous freefall into the darkest places of the soul as she roams the empty streets of a city that she has never learned to love. When she finds herself trapped inside the four walls of her apartment in the middle of a summer heat wave, Olga is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal again.

_______________ 'A passionate love letter to language and to Italy ... a bold and quirkily engaging self-portrait' - Lee Langley, Spectator 'A writer of uncommon elegance and poise' - New York Times 'A fascinating account of her linguistic exile' - Erica Wagner, Harper's Bazaar _______________ In Other Words is a revelation. It is at heart a love story of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college. Although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterwards, true mastery had always eluded her. Seeking full immersion, she decided to move to Rome with her family, for 'a trial by fire, a sort of baptism' into a new language and world. There, she began to read and to write - initially in her journal - solely in Italian. In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian, investigates the process of learning to express oneself in another language, and describes the journey of a writer seeking a new voice. Presented in a dual-language format, this is a wholly original book about exile, linguistic and otherwise, written with an intensity and clarity not seen since Vladimir Nabokov: a startling act of self-reflection and a provocative exploration of belonging and reinvention.

The extraordinary autobiography of novelist Marina Jarre, tracing her identity and relationships through a turbulent era of European history. 'Beautifully ingenious' Vivian Gornick 'Her masterwork' New York Times 'Rich and lyrical... Jarre's life is fascinating' New Statesman 'Ann Goldstein's shimmering translation of Jarre's prose delivers into English a European masterpiece' Benjamin Taylor 'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century' Il Libraio In distinctive, lyrical prose Jarre depicts an exceptionally multinational and complicated family: her elusive, handsome father, a Jewish man who perished in the Holocaust; her severe, cultured mother, an Italian Lutheran who translated Russian literature; her sister and Latvian grandparents. Shifting between past and present, Jarre narrates her coming-of-age; first as a linguistic minority in a Baltic nation and then in traumatic exile to Italy after her parents' divorce. There, she lived with her maternal grandparents among a community of French-speaking Waldensian Protestants and experienced the hostility of fascist Italy in the 1930s. Published in Italy in 1987 and now translated into English for the first time, Distant Fathers probes questions of memory, language, womanhood, belonging and estrangement, while asking what a homeland can be for those who have none, or many more than one.

FROM THE INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF A GIRL RETURNED, COMES A MOVING NEW NOVEL ABOUT SISTERHOOD, THE PAST AND ITS INDELIBLE MARKS * NATALIE PORTMAN'S BOOK CLUB PICK FOR JULY 2022* *A Strega Prize 2021 finalist * It's the darkest time of night. Adriana, a baby in her arms, hammers on her sister's door. Who is she running from? What uncomfortable truth will she deliver? Like a whirlwind, Adriana breaks into her sister's life bringing chaos and cataclysmic revelations. Years later, the narrator gets an unexpected, urgent summons back to Pescara. She embarks on a long journey through the night, and through the folds and twists of her memory, from her and her sister's youth, their loves and losses, their secrets and regrets. Back in Borgo Sud, the town's fishermen's quarter, in that impenetrable yet welcoming microcosm, she will discover what really happened, and perhaps make peace with the past. Donatella Di Pietrantonio, expert chronicler of the bonds between mothers and daughters, revisits the places and characters of A Girl Returned with a novel focussed on the ambivalent, ambiguous, wavering but steadfast relationship between sisters.

18M copies of Elena Ferrante's books sold worldwide "This is my last column, after a year that has scared and inspired me." With these words, Elena Ferrante, the bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend, bid farewell to her year-long collaboration with the Guardian. For a full year she penned short pieces, the subjects of which were suggested by editors at the Guardian, turning the writing process into a kind of prolonged interlocution; the subjects ranged from first love to climate change, from enmity among women to the adaptation of her novels to film and TV. As she said in her final column: "I have written as an author of novels, taking on matters that are important to me and that-if I have the will and the time-I'd like to develop within real narrative mechanisms." Here, then, are the seeds of possible future novels, the ruminations of an internationally beloved author, and the abiding preoccupations of a writer who has been called "one of the great novelists of our time" (The New York Times). Gathered together for the first time and accompanied by an entirely new introduction written by Elena Ferrante and by Andrea Ucini's intelligent, witty, and beautiful illustrations, this is a must for all Ferrante fans.

A moving Italian coming-of-age classic in a new translation by Ann Goldstein, celebrated translator of Elena Ferrante

On a remote island in the Bay of Naples, a young boy roams the shore with only his dog for company. Arturo's mother died in childbirth and his wayward father Wilhelm rarely returns to the island. Left in isolation, he dreams up a world of romantic exploits in which his father sails the seas like the heroes in his favourite stories.

When Wilhelm suddenly reappears with his new young wife Nunziata, Arturo's imagined world bursts apart, and he falls in passionate, tormented love. As Wilhelm's behaviour grows increasingly erratic, Arturo must begin to face the reality of his father's life, and of his own feelings.

A deeply affecting tale of childhood disenchantment, Arturo's Island is a work of stunning emotional force by one of modern Italian literature's foremost writers.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL 2016 AND THE US 2016 BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD

The fourth and final book of the internationally renowned and bestselling Neapolitan novels.

One of the major publishing events of 2015, this dazzling saga of two women - the brilliant Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila - firmly establishes the Neapolitan Quartet as perhaps the most significant work to date of the 21st century. Life's great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses suffered. But, throughout it all, their friendship remains the gravitational centre of their lives. The unmissable finale to a great literary achievement.

As the Gospels tell us, after the Last Supper Jesus retreats to a small field just outside the city of Jerusalem: Gethsemane, the olive grove. His prayers are interrupted when Judas arrives with a group of armed men, and kisses him. The kiss, given to point Jesus out to the guards, has become a powerful symbol of the wrenching experience of betrayal, and abandonment. Betrayed by his disciples, even by Peter, the most faithful of them all, Jesus is forsaken. His sin, to have drawn God closer to man. In The Night in Gethsemane, Massimo Recalcati, one of Italy's highest regarded psychoanalysts, traces the relationship between biblical text and psychoanalytical theory, revealing human life in all its fragility and its agony.

A Romeo & Juliet tale for Hamilton! fans. In post-American Revolution New York City, Theodosia Burr, a scholar with the skills of a socialite, is all about charming the right people on behalf of her father—Senator Aaron Burr, who is determined to win the office of president in the pivotal election of 1800. Meanwhile, Philip Hamilton, the rakish son of Alexander Hamilton, is all about being charming on behalf of his libido.    When the two first meet, it seems the ongoing feud between their politically opposed fathers may be hereditary. But soon, Theodosia and Philip must choose between love and family, desire and loyalty, and preserving the legacy their flawed fathers fought for or creating their own.     Love, Theodosia is a smart, funny, swoony take on a fiercely intelligent woman with feminist ideas ahead of her time who has long-deserved center stage. A refreshing spin on the Hamiltonian era and the characters we have grown to know and love. It’s also a heartbreaking romance of two star-crossed lovers, an achingly bittersweet “what if.� Despite their fathers’ bitter rivalry, Theodosia and Philip are drawn to each other and, in what unrolls like a Jane Austen novel of manners, we find ourselves entangled in the world of Hamilton and Burr once again as these heirs of famous enemies are driven together despite every reason not to be.

These early short stories brim with the beauty of the Italian countryside and seaside, telling tales both sumptuous and unnerving. Calvino's war-torn Italy is vivid, intense, almost hyper-real. A trio of greedy burglars rob a pastry shop, a boy offers a girl presents of toads and insects from the garden, a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him. In every story he reveals the hidden meaning beneath the surface of everyday life, and the ludicrousness of war. Some stories from Last Comes the Raven have been previously available in the collection Adam, One Afternoon. This new expanded collection includes several stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein and is an important addition to Calvino's legacy. 'In Last Comes the Raven, a collection of early stories, we find the man behind the magician' New Yorker

Clash of Civilisations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio tells the story of the immigrant tenants of a building in Rome, who offer skewed accounts of a murder. In this award-winning satire by the Algerian-born Italian author Amara Lakhous, each character takes his or her turn centre-stage, "giving evidence," recounting his or her story the dramas of emigration, the daily equivocations of immigration, the fears and misunderstandings of a life spent on society's margins, abused by mainstream culture's fears and indifference, preconceptions and insensitivity. What emerges is a touching story that is common to us all, whether we live in Rome, London or in Los Angeles. "The author's real subject is the heave and crush of modern, polyglot Rome, and he renders the jabs of everyday speech with such precision that the novel feels exclaimed rather than written." THE NEW YORKER