Cover of the book The Lying Life of Adults

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The Lying Life of Adults

byElena Ferrante

Genres: Fiction Romance Life-Rediscovery Journeys

Who is this book for? Readers interested in character-driven narratives exploring identity and family dynamics.

Topics IdentityFamilyComing of AgeSocial Class

MoodReflective, Melancholic

Female protagonist

RomanceMinor Subplot

Explicit scenesSuggestive Themes

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.

Language

Published on

07/08/2021

Pages

336

Format

Paperback

ISBN

9781787703124

Price Comparison

9.29 €

9.99 £

12.49 €

12.99 €

12.99 €

12.99 €

13 €

13 €

13 €

13 €

13.49 €

24 €

24 €

26.49 €

Editions in other languages

The Lying Life of Adults alternative edition book cover

Paperback

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