My Brilliant Friend

By Elena Ferrante

A modern day masterpiece by one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors. Set in the 1950’s on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Greco and her clever best friend Lila Cerullo survive childhood and adolescence in a bid for greatness and wealth in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood beset by patriarchal feuds and gendered violence…
~ Her Majesty Queen Camilla
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Publish Date: 2011

‘Rino’s mother is named Raffaella Cerullo, but everyone has always called her Lina. Not me … To me, for more than sixty years, she’s been Lila.’ Set in the 1950s, My Brilliant Friend is the first volume of the “Neapolitan quartet”, the story of a friendship blossomed in a violent and deprived neighbourhood of Naples. So different yet connected by an unbreakable bond, Elena and Lila are inseparable, but their paths converge and diverge, progressively increasing the distance between them.

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Elena Ferrante


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