'This is my last column, after a year that has scared and inspired me.'

With these words, Elena Ferrante, the bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend, bid farewell to her year-long collaboration with the Guardian. For a full year she penned short pieces, the subjects of which were suggested by editors at the Guardian, turning the writing process into a kind of prolonged interlocution; the subjects ranged from first love to climate change, from enmity among women to the adaptation of her novels to film and TV. As she said in her final column: 'I have written as an author of novels, taking on matters that are important to me and that — if I have the will and the time — I’d like to develop within real narrative mechanisms.'

Here, then, are the seeds of possible future novels, the ruminations of an internationally beloved author, and the abiding preoccupations of a writer who has been called 'one of the great novelists of our time' (the New York Times).

Gathered here in a beautiful gift edition and accompanied by a new, original introduction by the author and Andrea Ucini’s intelligent, witty, and beautiful illustrations, this is a must for all Ferrante fans.

Praise for Elena Ferrante

'Ferrante’s writing seems to say something that hasn’t been said before — it isn’t easy to specify what this is — in a way so compelling its readers forget where they are, abandon friends and disdain sleep.' — Joanna Biggs, The London Review of Books

'Ferrante has written about female identity with a heft and sharpness unmatched by anyone since Doris Lessing.' — Elizabeth Lowry, The Wall Street Journal

'Ferrante, in her unflinching willingness to lead us toward ‘the mutable fury of things’ places the readers inside intimate relations between with an irresistible and urgent immediacy.' — Roger Cohen, The New York Review of Books

'Reading Ferrante is an extraordinary experience. There’s a powerful and unsettling candor in her writing.' — Nick Romeo, The Boston Globe