Posts
List by pseudonymous author of beloved Neapolitan novels includes Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney and several Italian classics by Sian Cain, Guardian's books site editor.
Elena Ferrante, the bestselling pseudonymous Italian author behind My Brilliant Friend,
has named her favourite 40 books by female authors around the world,
with Toni Morrison, Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith all making the cut.
Sally Rooney, Zadie Smith, and Toni Morrison.
Composite: Patrick Bolger, Getty, Murdo MacLeod
The author, whose quartet of Neapolitan novels has sold 13m copies worldwide, has published her list on Bookshop.org, the online store that recently launched in the UK and gives a proportion of sales to independent booksellers. Ferrante’s UK publisher, Europa Editions, is returning their 10% sales commission from Ferrante’s list to Bookshop.org so it can be shared among the 300 independent bookshops that have signed up to the site so far.
Ferrante described her choices as being united by the theme of “stories of women with two feet, and sometimes one, in the 20th century”. All of the books are available in English, but span the world: Japan to Nigeria, India to Brazil.
The list include Pulitzer winners – Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies – and Booker winners such as Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things...
Bookseller Claire Harris, of independent bookshop Lutyens & Rubinstein, called it “a great list”. “I would happily read my way through it, some of them again and others I’d like to give a go,” she said. “There are authors on the list that probably wouldn’t be read without someone like Ferrante bringing attention to them, and she has a really good balance of famous and the not-so-well-known on this list. There is something for everyone.”
Source: The Guardian
