New Elena Ferrante novel coming in 2020

A new Elena Ferrante book is on its way.

After five years of silence, the popular and mysterious author is publishing a new novel next year. It is titled The Lying Life of Adults, and will be translated into English by Ann Goldstein. The official description from publisher Europa Editions takes the form of a first-person quote (possibly the opening lines…?).

“Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly,” the description reads. “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.”

Ferrante is most famous in America for her Neapolitan Novels quartet. The first of those novels, My Brilliant Friend, was recently adapted as a TV series by HBO.

The Lying Life of Adults will be published on June 9, 2020.

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