Reading List

Authors Like Elena Ferrante

Before her first novel, Troubling Love, came out in 1992, the writer who calls herself Elena Ferrante told her publishers that she would not promote it or appear in public, and she has kept to that ever since. Her four Neapolitan novels (2011–2014) open with an old woman, Lila Cerullo, vanishing from her life in Naples, and her childhood friend Elena Greco deciding to write down their sixty-year friendship so that Lila cannot disappear. In 2024 The New York Times named My Brilliant Friend the best book of the twenty-first century, and in October 2025 the four volumes were published in English as a single book. Her shorter novels follow a wife abandoned in Turin, a mother on a beach holiday who once left her daughters, and a girl who overhears her father say she is turning ugly. The ten writers below share her subjects: friendship between women, mothers and daughters, and what it costs a girl to get out.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary fiction · Female friendship · Italian fiction · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Elena Ferrante, start with Natalia Ginzburg, whose Family Lexicon (1963) tells an Italian family through its private language, and Elsa Morante, whose History (1974) follows a mother and son through wartime Rome. For the friendship itself, read Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), two girls in a small Ohio town who grow up and apart. Further down: a Nobel laureate who wrote her own life as the story of her class, and a novelist who did the opposite of hiding.

10 authors like Elena Ferrante

01
The Italian great before her

Elsa Morante

Italian · House of Liars (1948), Arturo’s Island (1957), History (1974)

Morante (1912–1985) was born in Rome. Arturo’s Island, about a boy growing up on the island of Procida in the Bay of Naples, won the Strega Prize in 1957. History follows a widowed schoolteacher and her young son through the Second World War and its aftermath in Rome, with the events of the war set out in short chronicles between the chapters.

Morante writes the same large, passionate Italian novel of family and history that Ferrante writes, with ordinary women at its centre and the twentieth century pressing in on them. History is the nearest thing in Italian literature to the scale of the Neapolitan Quartet.

— Lisanne
02
A family in its own words

Natalia Ginzburg

Italian · The Little Virtues (1962), Family Lexicon (1963)

Ginzburg (1916–1991) grew up in Turin in a Jewish, anti-fascist family; her first husband, Leone Ginzburg, died in prison after being arrested by the Germans in Rome in 1944. Family Lexicon, which won the Strega Prize in 1963, tells her family’s story through the phrases and sayings they repeated to one another. The Little Virtues collects her essays.

Ginzburg shows another way of writing Italian family life: dry, funny and plain where Ferrante is fierce. Both writers make domestic detail carry history, and both are honest about how family love and family pressure feel the same from the inside.

— Lisanne

Every book by Natalia Ginzburg →

03
A wife’s secret diary

Alba de Céspedes

Cuban-Italian · Her Side of the Story (1949), Forbidden Notebook (1952)

De Céspedes was born in Rome in 1911 to a Cuban father and an Italian mother, was an anti-fascist during the war and died in Paris in 1997. In Forbidden Notebook a married woman in post-war Rome buys a notebook and starts a diary she must hide from her husband and children. It was published in a new English translation by Ann Goldstein, Ferrante’s translator, in 2023.

Readers of The Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter will recognise the material: a respectable wife and mother discovering, in private writing, how angry and how hungry she is. De Céspedes did it seventy years earlier, and in the same translator’s English.

— Lisanne
04
Two girls, one town

Toni Morrison

American · Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987)

Morrison (1931–2019) was born in Lorain, Ohio, and worked as an editor in New York before and alongside her own writing. Sula follows two Black girls, Sula and Nel, from childhood in a small Ohio town into adult lives that take them in opposite directions. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Sula is the closest book in English to the friendship of Lila and Lenù: two girls who make each other, one who leaves and one who stays, and a love that turns into judgement. Morrison is more mythic and much shorter, but the questions are the same.

— Lisanne

Every book by Toni Morrison →

05
Girlhood cruelty, remembered

Margaret Atwood

Canadian · The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Cat’s Eye (1988)

Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939 and is best known for The Handmaid’s Tale. In Cat’s Eye, a painter, Elaine Risley, returns to Toronto for a retrospective of her work and remembers the girls, above all her friend Cordelia, who tormented her as a child. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Like the Neapolitan novels, Cat’s Eye is told by a successful woman looking back at the girlhood friend who shaped and hurt her. Atwood is cooler and more ironic, and more interested in how girls police one another than in class.

— Lisanne

Every book by Margaret Atwood →

06
Friends from the same estate

Zadie Smith

British · White Teeth (2000), Swing Time (2016)

Smith was born in north-west London in 1975 and published White Teeth at twenty-four. Swing Time follows two mixed-race girls who meet at a Saturday dance class in London; one has talent and leaves the estate behind, the other narrates. The novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Smith takes Ferrante’s structure — two girls, one gifted, one watching, and the question of who gets out — and moves it to twenty-first-century London and the world of celebrity. Readers often pair the two books, and the comparison is useful in both directions.

— Lisanne

Every book by Zadie Smith →

07
Class, written from life

Annie Ernaux

French · A Man’s Place (1983), The Years (2008), A Girl’s Story (2016)

Ernaux was born in 1940 and grew up in Yvetot, Normandy, where her parents ran a café-grocery. She has written almost entirely about her own life, as a girl who left her class through education, in short, flat books. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022; her support for the boycott of Israel drew criticism at the time.

Ernaux writes as non-fiction what Elena Greco tells as fiction: a clever girl from a poor family who studies her way into another world and never feels at home in either. Read A Girl’s Story beside The Story of a New Name.

— Lisanne

Every book by Annie Ernaux →

08
A working-class girl who writes

Tove Ditlevsen

Danish · Childhood (1967), Youth (1967), Dependency (1971)

Ditlevsen (1917–1976) grew up in a working-class district of Copenhagen and was a published poet as a young woman. Her three volumes of memoir, published together in English as The Copenhagen Trilogy, move from a childhood with a difficult mother to early literary fame, several marriages and an addiction to the opioids her doctor husband prescribed for her.

A Scandinavian counterpart to the Neapolitan story: a poor neighbourhood, a mother who frightens her, and a girl who knows from early on that writing is her way out. Ditlevsen is short and unsparing about herself, which suits readers who loved Ferrante’s honesty about ambition.

— Lisanne
09
A writer who chose Italian

Jhumpa Lahiri

American · Interpreter of Maladies (1999), In Other Words (2015), Whereabouts (2018)

Lahiri was born in London in 1967 to Bengali parents and grew up in Rhode Island. After winning the Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies, she moved to Rome and began writing in Italian: In Other Words is about learning the language, and Whereabouts is a short novel she wrote in Italian and translated into English herself. She has also translated Italian fiction, and wrote the foreword to Ann Goldstein’s translation of Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook.

Lahiri shares Ferrante’s subject of a woman between two worlds, and she is one of the few writers in English who reads Italian women’s fiction from inside the language. Her Italian books are quieter and more solitary, a useful contrast to Naples.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jhumpa Lahiri →

10
The opposite of anonymity

Karl Ove Knausgård

Norwegian · A Death in the Family (2009), My Struggle (2009–2011)

Knausgård was born in Oslo in 1968. His six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle, published in Norway between 2009 and 2011, describes his family, marriages and children under their real names, and members of his family objected publicly to how they were portrayed.

The writer who most directly complicates Ferrante’s method. Both wrote vast, intimate books about family, class and the urge to write that became international sensations in the same years, but Knausgård put his own name and his relatives’ on every page, while Ferrante keeps the author out of view so the books stand alone. Reading both raises the question of what exposure adds, and what it costs.

— Lisanne

Every book by Karl Ove Knausgård →

Where to start if you loved Elena Ferrante

If you loved the Neapolitan Quartet, read Elsa Morante.

History has the same scale: a mother, a son and a city at war.

If you loved the friendship of Lila and Lenù, read Toni Morrison or Zadie Smith.

Sula is the short classic; Swing Time moves the story to London.

If you loved The Days of Abandonment, read Alba de Céspedes.

Forbidden Notebook: a wife’s secret diary in post-war Rome.

If you want the class story told as fact, read Annie Ernaux.

Start with A Girl’s Story or The Years.

If you want to go back to Ferrante herself, read The Lost Daughter or Frantumaglia.

The Lost Daughter (2006) is her shortest novel; Frantumaglia collects her letters and written interviews about writing and anonymity.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Elena Ferrante

Who writes like Elena Ferrante?

Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg and Alba de Céspedes wrote the Italian novels of family and women’s lives that came before her. In English, Toni Morrison’s Sula, Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time tell similar stories of girlhood friendship.

What should I read after My Brilliant Friend?

Toni Morrison’s Sula for another friendship between two girls, Zadie Smith’s Swing Time for the same story in London, and Elsa Morante’s History for an Italian novel on the same scale.

Is Elena Ferrante like Sally Rooney?

Both write about friendship, class and clever young women, and readers often mention them together. Ferrante’s books cover whole lives and decades of Italian history; Rooney’s are set over a few years among young adults in contemporary Ireland.

Does Elena Ferrante have a new book?

Her most recent novel is The Lying Life of Adults (2019; in English 2020), and her most recent book is In the Margins (2021), essays on reading and writing. In October 2025 Europa Editions published the four Neapolitan novels in English in a single volume.

Which Elena Ferrante book should I read first?

My Brilliant Friend (2011), the first Neapolitan novel, is the usual starting point. For something short, try The Days of Abandonment (2002) or The Lost Daughter (2006).

Who is Elena Ferrante?

Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym. The author has published under that name since 1992, gives interviews only in writing and has never confirmed who she is.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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Every book by Elena Ferrante, in order →

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