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2015 Longlist

The Story of a New Name

Translated from the original Italian by Ann Goldstein

ABOUT
THE BOOK

“[Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels] don’t merely offer a teeming vision of working-class Naples, with its cobblers and professors, communists and mobbed-up businessmen, womanizing poets and downtrodden wives; they present one of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship.” -John Powers, Fresh Air, NPR

The second book, following 2012’s acclaimed 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 sometimes cruel price that this passage exacts.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Elena
Ferrante

Elena 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 trilogy, 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.

Elena Ferrante was born in Naples. She is the author of The Days of Abandonment, which the New York Times described as “stunning,” and two other novels, Troubling Love, and The Lost Daughter.

Elena 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 trilogy, 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.

Elena Ferrante was born in Naples. She is the author of The Days of Abandonment, which the New York Times described as “stunning,” and two other novels, Troubling Love, and The Lost Daughter.

NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS

This is the second volume in the Neapolitan novels/trilogy. The first two novels are set in post-World War 2 Italy, in a poor neighbourhood just outside of Naples where families struggle with poverty, survival and age-old customs, and where there is little, if any, hope, only the daily struggle to survive. The saga focuses on the lives of two girls who are at once friends and competitors. Each is bright, intelligent and promising, but some of their choices will trap them in lives of seething anger, desperation and hopelessness. The setting may be geographically distinct, but as with all great works, the characters and their predicaments have universal appeal. Ferrante shows an evolving relationship between Elena and Lila in this second book and portrays poverty, anger, frustration, and the dreams and yearnings of two young women who have few opportunities to escape their current situations. In her tightly woven command of plot and language, Ferrante is brilliant, and she continues to prove herself to be a modern master.
Continuing the story from My Brilliant Friend, of Elena and Lila and their youth and early womanhood in 1960s Naples, Italy, Ferrante depicts the inner lives of her characters with intimacy and power.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Date published
22/09/2012
Country
Italy
Original Language
Italian
Publisher
Europa Editions
Translator
Ann Goldstein
Translation
Translated from the original Italian by Ann Goldstein

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