My Brilliant Friend: The Four Volumes

“High stakes, subversive literature.”—The Telegraph When Elena Ferrante set out to write the story of Elena and Lila, she conceived it as one single work of fiction, one expansive novel that would capture the reality and ambivalence of female friendship, motherhood, marriage, class and adolescence. 2025 marks 10 years since publication of the quartet was completed.

To celebrate this anniversary, as well as honour and acknowledge the author’s original conception, we are releasing the four novels in one volume. Described by the New Yorker’s James Wood as “large, captivating, amiably peopled...a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal,” the Neapolitan Quartet tells a poignant, universal story about friendship and belonging.

“The capacity of stories to speak to anyone and in any time is the fruit of a mysterious mixture of sensibility, ability, and luck, and no writer really knows how that fruit ripens and if it has fully matured.”