Where to start with Elena Ferrante

Italian novelist, born 1943.

Best Elena Ferrante book to start with: My Brilliant Friend (2011), on 4 of the 11 lists it could have made.

Begin at the beginning, with My Brilliant Friend. It is the first of four novels about two girls growing up in a poor neighbourhood of Naples in the 1950s, and their friendship is the story. The index lists the quartet as a whole too, but treat it as four books to be read in order. Ferrante wrote in Italian, so read a page of the translation before you buy.

The Story of the Lost Child is the fourth and last, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2016. It will mean very little if you start there.

If you want to test Ferrante before committing to four books, The Days of Abandonment is a short, intense stand-alone novel about a woman whose husband leaves her. It is very bleak. The Lying Life of Adults is another stand-alone, set in Naples again, about a teenage girl, and it was shortlisted for Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2021. Read it after the quartet if you want more of the city.