Elena Ferrante is perhaps the greatest contemporary novelist you’ve never heard of. Author of the Neapolitan Novels, a tetralogy exploring two girls’, then women’s friendship over six decades, she has actually written one epic volume divided into four nearly equal parts. In almost 1,700 pages, Ferrante explores the tumultuous, give-and-take relationship between Elena, nicknamed Lenu, and Lila. Best friends since early childhood in post-World War II Italy, each represents the shadow side of the other, the unsayable force beneath their surface conventions, two souls competing in startling, often emotionally violent ways.
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