Elena Ferrante is as enigmatic equally she is fabulous. She'southward the globe'south virtually famous living pseudonymous writer – you could pass her on the street and not even know it! Ane of the minor glimpses she has given u.s. into her "real" life is a list of books she recommends. Y'all tin can check out the full list of forty here, but this mail is defended to the creme de la creme, five books recommended by Elena Ferrante that are KUWTP-tested and approved!

5 Books Recommended by Elena Ferrante - Book List - Keeping Up With The Penguins
If yous desire to buy one of these books recommended by Elena Ferrante, consider using an affiliate link on this page to do and so – I'll earn a small committee!

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara - Book Laid on Wooden Table - Keeping Up With The Penguins

It'due south hardly a surprise that Elena Ferrante would love and recommend Hanya Yanagihara'southward 2022 best-seller. Like her Neapolitan novels, A Piffling Life is a biography of a friendship, following it from youth through to the end of life. Perhaps if information technology had been published, in its 800+ page celebrity, before Ferrante'southward Neapolitan series went to press, her publisher might take conceded to press all four books as a single book (which, she has said, is how she wrote them and how they were intended). Ferrante'due south recommendation also tells us that she must have enough of reading fourth dimension on her hands: A Little Life is an UNDERTAKING. It's not slow moving, past whatever ways, merely it is LONG, and with a trove of item on every folio it's definitely not skimmable. Read my full review of A Lilliputian Life here.

The Year Of Magical Thinking past Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking - Book Laid on Wooden Table - Joan Didion

I was surprised to see The Yr Of Magical Thinking on the list of books recommended past Elena Ferrante, if only because I tend to acquaintance it more than with Didion's millennial fans (Ferrante being, presumably, a chip older than that). Ferrante would probably have been introduced to Didion during her earlier hey-mean solar day, in the Slouching Towards Bethlehem era. Still, it's wonderful to see that this memoir of grief and rumination resonates with Didion readers across the age brackets. If yous squint, you tin see some parallels between Didion equally she represents herself on the folio and Ferrante'southward characters: women who are introspective, bookish, and intense.

Breasts And Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

Breasts And Eggs - Mieko Kawakami - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Elena Ferrante recommended a number of books in translation, but my favourite is Breasts And Eggs by Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami. My edition was translated into English by Sam Bett and David Boyd, but I assume that Ferrante read it translated into Italian past Gianluca Coci (Seni e Uova). I wonder what might have changed in the story, what might be lost or found in the translation that Ferrante read and loved. At its core, presumably, the story remained the same: three women reckoning with what information technology means to exist a woman in contemporary Japan. (Psst: Ferrante's not the only one who loves Kawakami's work – Haruki Murakami called her Japan'south "nearly of import gimmicky novelist"!) Read my full review of Breasts And Eggs here.

Beloved past Toni Morrison

Beloved - Toni Morrison - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Toni Morrison'southward Dearest has become a classic of contemporary literature, and information technology'south rare that yous see a list of books recommended past whatever writer that doesn't include it – Elena Ferrante's list of book recommendations is no exception! Information technology is a "towering achievement" of a novel that "stares into the abyss of slavery", according to the blurb, just it's likewise a heart-wrenching depiction of the grief and trauma of womanhood and the lived experience of the black body. Like Ferrante, Morrison's prose is evocative in the extreme, and yous'll be transported by it. Read my full review of Honey here.

Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates

Blonde - Joyce Carol Oates - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Of all the books recommended by Elena Ferrante, Blonde might exist the ane that surprised me most. Afterwards all, Oates' oeuvre is huge (58 novels, plus plays and poetry and curt stories and novellas and…) – why would Ferrante cull the fictionalised life of moving-picture show star-slash-sex symbol Marilyn Monroe? Because information technology'southward brilliant, of course! Oates takes some imaginative leaps, sure, but that's all in service of providing a whole new perspective on the life of Norma Jean, one that volition unsettle and discomfit you lot in means you couldn't possibly look. This is another tough read (seriously, Ferrante, what most a rom-com?!) merely a very worthy one.