Following the fortunes of an adolescent girl through changing family dynamics and growing self-realisation, The Lying Life of Adults is a pitch-perfect dissection of Italian family life and the follies of youth.
Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year 2021
A powerful new novel set in a divided Naples by Elena Ferrante, the beloved best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend.
Giovanna’s pretty face has changed: it’s turning into the face of an ugly, spiteful adolescent. But is she seeing things as they really are? Into which mirror must she look to find herself and save herself?
She is searching for a new face in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: the Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and the Naples of the depths, which professes to be a place of excess and vulgarity. She moves between these two cities, disoriented by the fact that, whether high or low, the city seems to offer no answer and no escape.
Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly. The sentence was uttered under his breath, in the apartment that my parents, newly married, had bought in Rione Alto, at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri. Everything—the spaces of Naples, the blue light of a very cold February, those words—remained fixed. But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story, while in fact I am nothing, nothing of my own, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even the one who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.
Publisher: Europa Editions (UK) Ltd
ISBN: 9781787703124
Number of pages: 336
Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
"Modern, urgent, truthful." - Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Telegraph
"Elena Ferrante is an expert chronicler of adolescence and its many indignities, as well as its erratic, overwhelming passions." - The Observer
"Ferrante is unbeatable at pulling you inside the mind of a teenage girl, making you see how everything that looks irrational from the outside - the moods, the silences, the jealousy, tears, fears and resentments - are utterly logical and reasonable." - The Times
“Layer by layer, piece by piece, with her customary deftness, Ferrante builds up her story, introducing new characters and bits of information, as Giovanna’s once safe and sane world becomes ever more slippery…. Ferrante has a voice very much her own.” - The TLS
“The most intense writing about the experiences and interior life of a girl on the cusp of adulthood that I have ever read.” - Isabel Berwick
“Exquisitely moody.” - Merve Emre, The Atlantic
“Elena Ferrante is so good.… an astonishing, deeply moving tale of the sorts of wisdom, beauty and knowledge that remain as unruly as the determinedly inharmonious faces of these women.” - Lara Feigel, The Guardian
“Ferrante’s page-turner talent for suspenseful storytelling and scenes teeming with vivid characters finds terrific scope … From this gorgeous and squalid two-tier city that haunts her imagination comes another compulsive novel.” - Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times
“The accurate and evocative depiction of adolescence is also a significant factor in the fierce devotion inspired by the works of the Italian writer Elena Ferrante … Ann Goldstein, who has translated all of Ferrante’s works into English, does so again here with precision and poise.” - Miranda Collinge, Esquire
“An incendiary portrait of the volcanic currents of sex and betrayal rumbling away beneath polite society.” - Anthony Cummins, The Mail on Sunday
“Ferrante is a hypnotist.” - Frances Wilson, The Spectator
“Compulsive.” - Alex O'Donnell, The Times
“Ferrante is finally back. Her new novel, the first since her blockbusting Neapolitan Quartet finished, takes us back to Naples.” - The Times
“The Lying Life of Adults simply enriches a magnificent canon which began with Troubling Love nearly 30 years ago. There’s not a weak page, let alone a weak novel, among the eight to date.” - David Nice, The Arts Desk
"The Lying Life of Adults has the magnitude of great literature - from Balzac to Stendhal to the always beloved Proust. It is a necessary book." - Il Manifesto
“A must for Ferrante fans.” - The Times
We are back to Naples in Elena Ferrante’s new book, seeing the city through the eyes of the young adolescent narrator Giovanna. Her changing image in the mirror and belief in herself lead her to discover family... More
I did not like this much anticipated book. I enjoyed the Neopolitan Quartet and looked forward to Elena Ferrante’s new novel. I just took an instant dislike to Giovanna. It could be an age thing as at her age I was a... More
Yet another layer of Ferrante’ s investigation into the links that bind us to our family nourishing sometimes and true ties at other moments. This time she uses the point of view (and the emotional volcano) of a... More
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