Author Guide · Literary Fiction
Books Written by
In 1991, before her first novel came out, the writer who calls herself Elena Ferrante wrote to her publisher Sandra Ozzola that she would not promote it, and she has kept to that ever since: no photographs, no festival stages, interviews only in writing. Her books went the other way. My Brilliant Friend (2011), the first of four novels about two girls from a poor neighbourhood of Naples, became an international bestseller in Ann Goldstein’s English translation, an HBO and RAI series, and in 2024 the number one title on The New York Times’ list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. This guide covers her nine key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 9 key books · 1992–2019 · Updated October 2026
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book below.
Quick answer
Elena Ferrante’s best-known books are the four Neapolitan novels, starting with My Brilliant Friend (2011) and ending with The Story of the Lost Child (2014), plus The Days of Abandonment (2002), The Lost Daughter (2006) and The Lying Life of Adults (2019). Start with My Brilliant Friend; read on for the right order of the quartet and what is known, and not known, about who she is.
Where to Start with Elena Ferrante
If you want the Neapolitan Quartet
→ My Brilliant Friend (2011) — volume one, read the other three in order after it.
If you want a short, intense novel
→ The Days of Abandonment (2002) — a woman left by her husband, in under 200 pages.
If you want the book behind the 2021 film
→ The Lost Daughter (2006) — Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter.
If you want her on writing and anonymity
→ Frantumaglia (2003).
9 Elena Ferrante Books, in Order
Troubling Love
Her first novel (L’amore molesto). Delia, a comic-book illustrator living in Rome, returns to Naples after her mother Amalia is found drowned, and retraces her mother’s last days through the city. Mario Martone filmed it in 1995 as Nasty Love; the English translation followed in 2006.
The Days of Abandonment
Olga, a former writer living in Turin with two children and a dog, is told by her husband Mario that he is leaving her. The novel follows the weeks of breakdown that follow, almost hour by hour, inside a flat she can barely manage. Roberto Faenza filmed it in 2005, the year the English translation appeared.
Frantumaglia
Her letters to her publishers, written interviews and occasional pieces, first published in 2003 as La frantumaglia and later expanded to cover the Neapolitan novels; the English edition appeared in 2016. It includes the 1991 letter explaining why she would stay out of view. The title is a word from her mother’s dialect for a jumble of fragments in the mind.
The Lost Daughter
Leda, a divorced university teacher whose two grown daughters have moved to Canada to live with their father, takes a summer holiday on the Ionian coast of southern Italy. There she becomes fixated on a young mother, Nina, and her small daughter, and takes the child’s doll. Maggie Gyllenhaal adapted it as a film in 2021, starring Olivia Colman.
My Brilliant Friend
An ageing Elena Greco learns that her friend Lila Cerullo has disappeared without a trace, and begins writing down their story. This first volume covers their childhood and adolescence in a poor, violent neighbourhood of Naples in the 1950s: Elena studies her way out, Lila is pulled out of school, and the book ends at Lila’s wedding at sixteen. In 2024 The New York Times placed it first on its list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.
The Story of a New Name
The two friends’ youth in the 1960s: Lila’s marriage to the grocer Stefano Carracci goes wrong, a summer on Ischia changes both their lives, and Elena leaves Naples to study in Pisa and publishes a first novel. The English translation was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award in 2014.
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
Elena marries into an academic family in Florence and has two daughters, while Lila, who has left her husband, works in a sausage factory amid the labour conflicts and political violence of the late 1960s and 1970s. The book follows them into adult life, as the gap between the one who left and the one who stayed keeps changing shape.
The Story of the Lost Child
The final volume follows both women from the late 1970s into old age, back in Naples, where they become pregnant at the same time and raise their children side by side until a loss that marks the rest of their lives. The English translation was one of The New York Times’ ten best books of 2015 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016.
The Lying Life of Adults
Giovanna, a girl from a comfortable family in the upper part of Naples in the 1990s, overhears her father say she is getting ugly, like his estranged sister Vittoria. She goes looking for the aunt in the poorer city below, and finds the adults around her lying to one another. Netflix released a series based on it, directed by Edoardo De Angelis, in 2023.
In What Order to Read Elena Ferrante
The four Neapolitan novels are one continuous story and must be read in order: My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child. Each ends where the next begins, and the first opens with a scene from the end of the fourth.
Her other novels stand alone. Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter are short, each about one woman in a crisis, and work as a way in before the quartet or as a follow-up. Frantumaglia is best kept for after the novels, when you want to know what she thinks about them.
A reading path
1. The Days of Abandonment (2002)
2. My Brilliant Friend (2011)
3. The Story of a New Name (2012)
4. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013)
5. The Story of the Lost Child (2014)
6. Frantumaglia (2003)
Everything Else Elena Ferrante Published
Beyond the 9 key books: 3 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Children’s book
1
1 book · 2007
- 2007The Beach at Nighta doll left behind on a beach overnight; English edition 2016
Essays and columns
2
2 books · 2019–2021
- 2019Incidental Inventionsher weekly columns for The Guardian, 2018
- 2021In the Marginsessays on the pleasures of reading and writing; English edition 2022
The years · 1992–2024
Quick facts about Elena Ferrante
- Known for
- She is known for the four Neapolitan novels about the lifelong friendship of Elena and Lila, written under a pseudonym she has kept since 1992.
- 1992
- Troubling Love, her first novel
- 2002
- The Days of Abandonment
- 2016
- Time 100 and the Man Booker International shortlist
- 2024
- Number one on the NYT list of the century’s best books
- Name
- A pseudonym, used since her first novel in 1992
- Origins
- She has said she was born and grew up in Naples
- Publishers
- Edizioni E/O in Italy; Europa Editions in English
- Translator
- Ann Goldstein, for all her books in English
- Neapolitan Quartet
- Four novels, 2011–2014
- Honours
- Time 100 Most Influential People (2016); Man Booker International shortlist (2016)
The red mark is 2011: My Brilliant Friend, the first of the four Neapolitan novels.
How Elena Ferrante Writes: Naples, Friendship and the Frantumaglia
Almost all her fiction is told in the first person by a woman looking back, and almost all of it returns to Naples, even when the narrator lives in Rome, Turin or Florence. The city is drawn as a set of real places, from the poor rione where Elena and Lila grow up to the wealthy streets above it in The Lying Life of Adults, and dialect works as a marker of class and of violence that the narrators try to escape.
Her subject is the relationship that cannot be got rid of: between mother and daughter in Troubling Love and The Lost Daughter, wife and husband in The Days of Abandonment, and above all between two friends in the Neapolitan novels, where admiration and rivalry drive each other for six decades. She calls the state of mind her narrators fall into, when order breaks up into pieces, frantumaglia, a word she took from her mother.
The prose is direct and fast rather than ornamental, and the Neapolitan novels move like serial fiction, each volume ending on an open turn. Since 1991 she has argued that the books should stand without an author’s face beside them; her interviews, collected in Frantumaglia, are given only in writing, and mostly about the work.
Frequently asked questions about Elena Ferrante’s books
How many books has Elena Ferrante written?
By 2021, twelve books had been published under her name: eight novels, a children’s book and three volumes of non-fiction. The nine key books on this page run from Troubling Love (1992) to The Lying Life of Adults (2019); the other three are The Beach at Night (2007), Incidental Inventions (2019) and In the Margins (2021).
What are Elena Ferrante’s books in order?
Troubling Love (1992), The Days of Abandonment (2002), Frantumaglia (2003), The Lost Daughter (2006), My Brilliant Friend (2011), The Story of a New Name (2012), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013), The Story of the Lost Child (2014) and The Lying Life of Adults (2019). The years are those of the Italian first editions.
Where should I start with Elena Ferrante?
With My Brilliant Friend, the first Neapolitan novel, then the other three in order. If you would rather try a single short book first, read The Days of Abandonment.
What is Elena Ferrante’s most famous book?
My Brilliant Friend (2011), the first of the Neapolitan novels. In 2024 The New York Times named it the best book of the 21st century so far, at the top of its list of 100.
In what order should I read the Neapolitan novels?
My Brilliant Friend (2011), The Story of a New Name (2012), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013) and The Story of the Lost Child (2014). They form one continuous story, so read them in that order.
Who is Elena Ferrante, and has her identity been revealed?
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym, used since 1992, and the author has never confirmed who she is. In October 2016 an Italian journalist published an investigation based on financial and property records that claimed to identify her; it was widely criticised as an invasion of privacy, and neither Ferrante nor her publisher has confirmed it. She has said in written interviews that she was born and grew up in Naples.
Why does Elena Ferrante write anonymously?
In a 1991 letter to her publisher Sandra Ozzola, before her first novel appeared, she wrote: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.” She has kept to that position since.
Is My Brilliant Friend a TV series?
Yes. HBO and the Italian broadcaster RAI made My Brilliant Friend, created by Saverio Costanzo, in four seasons from 2018 to 2024, one for each Neapolitan novel. It is filmed in Italian, with much of the dialogue in Neapolitan dialect.
Which Elena Ferrante books have been made into films?
Three novels have been filmed: Troubling Love by Mario Martone (1995, Nasty Love), The Days of Abandonment by Roberto Faenza (2005) and The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal (2021). The Lying Life of Adults became a Netflix series in 2023.
Who translates Elena Ferrante into English?
Ann Goldstein, an editor at The New Yorker, has translated all of her books into English for Europa Editions, the English-language sister of her Italian publisher, Edizioni E/O.
Footnotes
- Elena Ferrante — Wikipedia
- Elena Ferrante — internationales literaturfestival berlin
- Elena Ferrante explains why she publishes anonymously — Electric Literature
- On Elena Ferrante — The Paris Review
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.”
— Elena Ferrante, letter to her publisher Sandra Ozzola (1991)
If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations