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Europa Editions has revealed it will publish Elena Ferrante’s first novel for five years, The Lying Life of Adults, in June 2020.
The book will be published in Italy on 7th November 2019 by Edizioni E/O, as reported in September, while Ferrante’s English language publisher Europa will publish seven months later, on 9th June 2020. The Lying Life of Adults has been revealed as the title; it will be translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein. It will retail in hardback at £20.
Europa Editions also shared a short extract from the story following the original announcement in September: "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.”
Daniela Petracco, director of Europa Editions UK, said: “I look forward to the lively conversation I’m sure will surround Ferrante’s first new work of fiction to be published in five years.”
Ferrante wrote the hugely successful Neapolitan series which started with 2011's My Brilliant Friend (Europa). Altogether she has sold 697,764 books for £7.25m in the UK, with My Brilliant Friend her bestseller at 303,240 copies sold in paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan.
The four-part Neapolitan series follows Elena Greco and her friend Raffaella Cerullo, who she has always called Lila, in the first year of primary school in 1950. Set against a dangerous and vibrant Naples, the story explores 60 years of their lives as Elena tries to unravel the mystery of her friend. Additionally an eight-part TV adaptation of My Brilliant Friend was broadcast on Sky Atlantic in November 2018. A play, "My Brilliant Friend", adapted from the novels by April De Angelis, will open at London's National Theatre next month.
Ferrante, who writes under a pseudonym, latest book, Incidental Inventions will be published by Europa on 21st November. Since the publication of the Neapolitan series, she has also written Frantumaglia and the children’s illustrated book The Beach at Night. In 2016 an Italian investigative journalist claimed to have found the author's identity.