The Neapolitan Novels Boxed Set - Paperback

Elena Ferrante's four-volume chronicle of a 60-year friendship between two women in postwar Naples.

The Neapolitan Novels follow Lenù and Lila from childhood through maturity in a Naples of poverty, education, ambition, and enduring attachment. The intensity of their friendship is told with a realism that makes most fiction feel polite. Ferrante's accomplishment is that she makes the interior lives of women matter absolutely.

Faculty teaching contemporary European literature and gender studies assign this. It is also the series for colleagues who have been waiting for a truly adult female friendship told with full complexity.