The Lying Life of Adults

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

Elena Ferrante, Ann Goldstein

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Hardback

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English

Europa Editions (UK) Ltd
01 September 2020

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

'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.'

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.

By: Elena Ferrante
Translated by: Ann Goldstein
Imprint: Europa Editions (UK) Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 225mm, Width: 155mm,
ISBN: 9781787702363
ISBN 10: 1787702367
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 01 September 2020
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008) and the four volumes of the Neapolitan Quartet (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child), published by Europa Editions between 2012 and 2015. She is also the author of a children's picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night, and a work of non-fiction, Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey. Incidental Inventions, her collected Guardian columns, was published in 2019.

Reviews for The Lying Life of Adults: A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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 * /The Lying Life of Others/ has the magnitude of great literature - from Balzac to Stendhal to the always beloved Proust. It is a necessary book. * Il Manifesto *