The series offers us two almost-complete life cycles, yet these lives are far from circular. After all, this is not a world that feels particularly safe - Lenu and Lila’s home is rife with violence, misogyny, terror - but it is intensely different from the one we have known for the past few weeks. Here, escapism is not about avoiding or denying, but about finding balance and separation. The result is a completely mesmeric, two-in-one coming of age story, all-consuming from start to finish. Spanning over fifty years, Ferrante charts the moments at which the lives of the two women converge and diverge, punctuated by marriage, education (or lack thereof), and motherhood. Set in and around Naples, Ferrante’s novels follow the friendship of two girls, Lenu - who narrates the story - and Lila, from its foundations in early childhood to its disintegration in old age. It is a series I have been meaning to read for several years, and yet somehow it has taken a global pandemic for me to find the time to do so. In particular, Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels ( My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of a Lost Child), translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein, have been almost supernaturally stabilising. Over the past few weeks, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis and performative productivity, reading for pleasure - something I have struggled with since starting my degree - has been my solace.

This quote, amongst countless others, proves the redundancy of trying to say anything new and interesting about Ferrante’s work her writing understands and addresses itself more adeptly and beautifully than anything else I have ever read. In The Story of a Lost Child, the final instalment of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, the narrator speaks of the power of literature to “safeguard a secret meaning that took meaning away from everything else”.

Neapolitan quartet