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.

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood 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 they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. 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 her protagonists, the unforgettable Elena and Lila. Ferrante is the author of three previous works of critically acclaimed fiction: The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, and The Lost Daughter. With this novel, the first in a tetralogy, she proves herself to be one of Italy's great storytellers. She has given her readers a masterfully plotted page-turner, abundant and generous in its narrative details and characterizations, that is also a stylish work of literary fiction destined to delight her many fans and win new readers to her fiction.

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 entree 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.

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.

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.

Woven through all these tales are the unique histories and mythologies of the regions of Southern Italy, encompassing Sicily, Calabria, Cantania, Basilicata, Apulia and Campania. Theocritus, Virgil and Ovid evoke a Sicily populated by Cyclopes and sea monsters, while in an excerpt from The Smile of the Unknown Mariner Vincenzo Consolo depicts the island in 1860, on the frontline in Italy's war of independence. The South's legendary legacy of brigandage and organized crime enlivens the stories of Leonardo Sciascia, Carlo Levi and Joseph Conrad. Curzio Malaparte and Norman Lewis immortalize the wreckage of Naples and the indomitable spirit of its people during World War II, and Elena Ferrante paints a spectacular portrait of a poor but vibrant Neapolitan neighbourhood in an excerpt from the bestselling My Brilliant Friend. Collectively, these entertaining tales plunge readers into the sometimes harsh and troubled, but always seductive and vital world of Italy's Mezzogiorno

Surpassing the rapturous storytelling of the previous titles in the Neapolitan Novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name), Ferrante here reunites Elena and Lila, two childhood friends, who dissect subjects as complicated as their own relationship, including feminism and class, men and women, mothers and children, sex and violence, and origin and destiny. As the narrative unfolds in the late 1960s and early '70s, the fiery Lila stays in Naples, having escaped an abusive marriage, and lives platonically with a man from the neighborhood, along with her young, possibly illegitimate son. The feisty Elena leaves town, graduates from a university in Pisa, publishes a successful book, marries an upper-class professor, and moves to Florence, where she gives birth to two daughters. Against the backdrop of student revolution and right-wing reaction, the two women's tumultuous friendship seesaws up and down as each tries to outdo the other. "You wanted to write novels," Lila tells Elena. "I created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality." Are the two women less opposites than parts of a whole? The book concludes not with a duality but with a surprising new triangle involving Nino, another homegrown intellectual, who loves both women. (Sept.)

The second book, following last year's My Brilliant Friend, featuring the two friends Lila and Elena. The two protagonists are now in their twenties. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila. Meanwhile, Elena continues her journey of self-discovery. The two young women share a complex and evolving bond that brings them close at times, and drives them apart at others. Each vacillates between hurtful disregard and profound love for the other. With this complicated and meticulously portrayed friendship at the center of their emotional lives, the two girls mature into women, paying the cruel price that this passage exacts.

Frantumaglia invites readers into Elena Ferrante's workshop. The bestselling Italian author of My Brilliant Friend opens her desk drawers and offers readers a chance to sort through what they find there. Consisting of over twenty years of letters, essays, reflections, and interviews, it is a unique depiction of an author who embodies a consummate passion for writing. In these pages Ferrante answers many of her readers' questions. She addresses her choice to stand aside and let her books live autonomous lives. She discusses her thoughts and concerns as her novels are being adapted into films. She talks about the challenge of finding concise answers to interview questions. She explains the joys and the struggles of writing, the anguish of composing a story only to discover that it isn't good enough for publication. She contemplates her relationship with psychoanalysis, with the cities she has lived in, with motherhood, with feminism, and with her childhood as a storehouse for memories, impressions, and fantasies. The result is a vibrant and intimate portrait of a writer at work

In Ferrante's fourth and final Neapolitan novel, she reunites Elena, the accomplished writer, with Lila, the indomitable spirit, in their Southern Italian city as they confront maturity and old age, death, and the meaning of life. The two friends face the chaos of a corrupt and decaying Naples while the lives of the people closest to them-plagued by abandonment, imprisonment, murder, and betrayal-spiral out of control. "Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?" Lila asks Elena, disparaging her friend's career choice in the process. Readers will need the accompanying index of characters to keep track as Ferrante resolves the themes and events from earlier titles (My Brilliant Friend; The Story of a New Name; Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay) with a force and ferocity recalling the devastating earthquake of 1980 and Vesuvius's volcanic eruptions, which themselves provide the unsettling background to the narrative. Ferrante's precise foreshadowing is such that an early incident of a lost doll in book one mirrors the lost child in book four right down to their shared first name-and "The Blue Fairy," the story Lila scribbled in a childhood notebook that Elena threw in the Arno, resurfaces in this installment's final pages. Throughout, there's the sense of the circle completing: near the end, Elena pens a short novel entitled "A Friendship" (a metafictional nod to Ferrante's series as a whole), inspired by her half-century relationship with Lila. The novel is Elena's final work and permanently ties Elena and Lila together, for better and worse. This stunning conclusion further solidifies the Neapolitan novels as Ferrante's masterpiece and guarantees that this reclusive author will remain far from obscure for years to come. (Sept.)

"Моя гениальная подруга" - первая из четырех книг знаменитого "неаполитанского квартета" Элены Ферранте. Это история об обычных людях, каких можно увидеть в соседнем дворе. Они совершают обычные и необъяснимые поступки, говорят что-либо опрометчиво, ссорятся и мирятся, по глупости выходят замуж, корпят ночами над учебниками... И в этой обыденности скрыта какая-то магия. На страницах романа, залитых жарким солнцем, каждый найдет кусочек своего детства, а в персонажах неожиданно узнает себя... "Элена Ферранте магией писательского слова, словно взмахом волшебной палочки, переносит нас, читателей, в Италию времен ее детства - дикую, необузданную, опасную, с ее драками на улицах, кровной местью, стрельбой, правом богатого и сильного, - тем не менее такую душевную и теплую, такую родную и близкую. Застраиваются улицы и целые кварталы, сносятся дома, погибают деревья и люди, но та незабвенная страна - страна из детства и окрыляющий мир юности - остаются с нами навсегда". Из отзывов читателей Комментарии и словарь Л.Н. Латыповой.

Following her mother’s untimely death, Delia sets off on a breathtaking 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.

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.

Лицензионное издание, выпущенное на виниле. Содержание альбома: Il Cittadino Si Ribella (Main Titles), Goodbye My Friend (Slow Version), Drivin All Around (Instrumental Version), Goodbye My Friend (Rock Version), Goodbye My Friend (Slow Version), Il Cittadino Si Ribella (Main Titles Reprise), Goodbye My Friend (Vocal Version), Goodbye My Friend (Slow Version), Il Cittadino Si Ribella (Country Mood), Goodbye My Friend (Rock Version), Drivin All Around (Instrumental Version), Goodbye My Friend (Rock Version), Drivin All Around (Vocal - Single Version), Il Cittadino Si Ribella (Main Theme Reprise), Goodbye My Friend (Rock Version), Goodbye My Friend (Vocal - Single Version)

Лицензионное издание, выпущенное на виниле. Содержание альбома: Il Cittadino Si Ribella (Main Titles), Goodbye My Friend (Slow Version), Drivin All Around (Instrumental Version), Goodbye My Friend (Rock Version), Goodbye My Friend (Slow Version), Il Cittadino Si Ribella (Main Titles Reprise), Goodbye My Friend (Vocal Version), Goodbye My Friend (Slow Version), Il Cittadino Si Ribella (Country Mood), Goodbye My Friend (Rock Version), Drivin All Around (Instrumental Version), Goodbye My Friend (Rock Version), Drivin All Around (Vocal - Single Version), Il Cittadino Si Ribella (Main Theme Reprise), Goodbye My Friend (Rock Version), Goodbye My Friend (Vocal - Single Version)

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.