My Brilliant Friend is the first novel of a tetralogy known as the Neapolitan Quartet. The series includes My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). The novel and its successors are set primarily in Naples, Italy and tell the story of a long and complicated friendship between two women. My Brilliant Friend covers the women's childhood and adolescence in the 1950s. It puts a twist on historical fiction and the coming-of-age novel, as the book is told from the point of view of the narrator in the future. Elena Greco is in her sixties looking back on her relationship with Lila Cerullo.
The...
