Dear readers, try reading this book and you will wish it never ends. Elena Ferrante, with her new novel, returns to surprise us, to throw us off balance, giving us a river-like narration that we rely on as when we take a trip with such pleasant ease, with such intense involvement, that the further away the destination, the better. The author abandons the small, dense private story and dedicates herself to a vast writing project that tells of a female friendship, that between Lila Cerullo and Elena Greco, from childhood in Naples in the 1950s to the present day. *My Brilliant Friend* begins by following the two protagonists as children, and then as teenagers, behind the scenes of a miserable neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, among a crowd of minor characters accompanied along their path with careful assiduity. The author meanwhile delves into the complex nature of the friendship between two girls, between two young girls, between two women, following step by step their individual growth, the way they influence each other, the good and bad feelings that nourish a true, robust relationship over the decades. She then narrates the effects of the changes that invest the neighborhood, Naples, Italy, in more than fifty years, transforming the friends and their bond. And all this precipitates into the page with the pace of great popular narratives, dense and at the same time fast, deep and light, continuously overturning situations, revealing secret depths of the characters, adding event to event without respite, but with the depth and power of voice to which the author has accustomed us... We don't want to tell you anything else so as not to spoil the pleasure of reading. We were saying that *My Brilliant Friend* belongs to that kind of book that you would never want to end. And in fact it doesn't end. Or, to put it better, in this first novel it fully completes the narration of the childhood and adolescence of Lila and Elena, but leaves us on the threshold of new great changes that are about to upset their lives and their very intense relationship. The story unfolds in the subsequent volumes, to tell us about the youth, maturity, and incipient old age of the two friends.
