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. ― Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), and the four novels known as the Neapolitan Quartet (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child) which were published by Europa Editions between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018. Ferrante is also the author of Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey