The bewildering and bedazzling world of the ever-mysterious Elena Ferrante Premium

Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend explores friendship, poverty, and feminism in Naples, captivating readers worldwide.

We love lists for the semblance of order it gives to our messy lives. When The New York Times came up with the 100 Best Books of the 21st century, we pored over it, happily rediscovering gems, mourning a missing favourite and questioning what we thought was a dodgy inclusion. The top three spots are claimed by women —Hilary Mantel’s extraordinary reimagining of Thomas Cromwell’s life, Wolf Hall, was in the third spot, Isabel Wilkerson’s magnificently detailed account of the great migration of Black Americans, The Warmth of Other Suns, came in second and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first of her Neapolitan quartet, took the top spot.

Ferrante has two other entries in the list with The Days of Abandonment at 92 and the heart-breaking conclusion to the Neapolitan quartet, The Story of the Lost Child, at 80. My Brilliant Friend, translated by Ann Goldstein, was published in English in 2012, a year after it was originally published in Italian. It was followed by The Story of a New Name and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.

The novel tells the story of two girls, Lenù and Lila, growing up in a tough neighbourhood in Naples in the 1950s. The first book follows the girls from the age of six and ends with a poignant cliff hanger at Lila’s wedding at the age of 16. My Brilliant Friend begins in 2010 with a 66-year-old Lenù, getting a telephone call saying Lila has literally vanished without a trace. Nothing of her remains, from her clothes, shoes, books and keepsakes to cutting herself out of every photograph.

Lenù realises this is what Lila wanted to do, had spoken of doing — erasing herself and the life she left behind. Angry, Lenù decides to write everything she remembers about Lila, which she does in four brilliant books, tracing the two girls’ lives, intertwined with the history and politics of the region.

The books are intensely confined to the impoverished neighbourhood in Naples and simultaneously also the larger world, encompassing Italy and the rest. There is the trauma of World War II, the rise of communism and radical feminism, crime, Camorra, drugs and computers as well as the softer cultural markers from photo romances and Lambrettas to Jackie Kennedy’s iconic style.

Circumstances separate the girls, with Lenù going on to study and becoming an author, and Lila, who is frighteningly intelligent, giving up school as her parents do not think it necessary to educate her, helping her mother at home and her father in the shoe shop.

Even in the shoe shop, Lila, who after reading Little Women, decided to become a novelist to become rich and wrote a novel, The Blue Fairy, designs beautiful shoes. Though her father does not wish to make shoes — everyone prefers factory-made shoes, he says, Lila and her brother make a pair of shoes, which is the cause of a great deal of heartache.