Recommendations
Books Like My Brilliant Friend
Best books to read after My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend is the first of the Neapolitan Novels — four books tracing Elena and Lila from a poor Naples neighborhood in the 1950s through old age. These recommendations continue the Ferrante canon, explore the tradition of the European novel of female friendship and class, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel about two women who are each other's greatest rival and most essential mirror.
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The Story of a New Name
by Elena Ferrante
The second Neapolitan Novel — Elena and Lila in their early twenties, Lila in a miserable marriage to a grocery-store owner, Elena at university in Pisa; the volume where the rivalry between the two women and the difference that education makes become the central drama.
- 2Buy
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
by Elena Ferrante
The third Neapolitan Novel — Elena as a published author and young mother in Florence, Lila working in a sausage factory in Naples; the novel that most directly confronts the political and economic forces shaping Italian women's lives in the 1970s.
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The Story of the Lost Child
by Elena Ferrante
The fourth and final Neapolitan Novel — Elena and Lila in middle age, both back in Naples, their lives entangled in ways neither could have anticipated; the volume that resolves the quartet's central question about what becomes of the two women's extraordinary friendship.
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The Days of Abandonment
by Elena Ferrante
The companion Ferrante novel from before the Neapolitan Quartet — Olga's account of the weeks after her husband leaves her for a younger woman; the Ferrante novel most often recommended for readers who want to experience her voice before committing to the four-volume Neapolitan series.
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A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
The contemporary American companion in the tradition of literary fiction about intense, decades-long friendship — Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm navigating friendship and ambition and loss in New York over decades; the novel that most directly rivals the Neapolitan Quartet in its scope and emotional intensity.
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Normal People
by Sally Rooney
The Irish companion in the tradition of the literary novel about class and intimacy — Connell and Marianne's on-and-off relationship from their Irish small town to Trinity College Dublin; shares the Neapolitan Quartet's interest in how class shapes the possibilities available to people who grow up together in the same place.
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Dept. of Speculation
by Jenny Offill
The American literary companion in the tradition of fragmented fiction about female consciousness — an unnamed narrator's account of her marriage, her writing, and the affair that threatens both; the novel that most closely approximates Ferrante's interest in a woman's interior life in short, intense prose.
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White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
The British companion in the tradition of the multi-generational literary novel about how class and background shape individual possibility — Zadie Smith's debut following two North London families across five decades; shares the Neapolitan Quartet's interest in the long arc of historical change as it runs through individual lives.
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