26. Mafia and Mystery: Is ‘My Brilliant Friend’ the Greatest Novel of the Century?

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3:14We saw each other in the courtyard more and more frequently. We showed off our dolls to each other, but without appearing to. At some point, we let the dolls meet as a test to see if they got along. And so came the day when we sat next to the cellar window with the curled grating and exchanged our dolls. She holding mine and I hers. And Leela abruptly pushed Tina through the opening in the grating and dropped her. I felt an unbearable sorrow. I was attached to my plastic doll. It was the most precious possession I had. I knew that Leela was mean, but I had never expected her to do something so spiteful to me.

3:52I held back my despair. I held it back on the edge of my wet eyes so that Leela said to me in dialect, you don't care about her? I didn't answer. I felt a violent pain, but I sensed that the pain of quarrelling with her would be even stronger. I was as if strangled by two agonies, one already happening, the loss of the doll and one possible, the loss of Leela. I said nothing. I only acted without spite, as if it were natural, even if it wasn't natural and I knew I was taking a great risk. I merely threw into the cellar her new, the doll she had given me. Leela looked at me in disbelief. What you do, I do, I recited immediately, aloud, very frightened.

4:36Now go and get it for me. if you go and get mine.

4:41Dominic Sandbrook: Well, hello, everybody. So that was Elena Ferrante's bestselling novel, My Brilliant Friend, Lamica Geniale. And if you enjoyed that little bit of Italian that I gave you, I should say I was initially slated to read the part of Leela in Tabby's opening reading, but I was kicked out by Tabby and Alia for my Italian voice, which was regarded as inappropriate. So that was sad. Anyway. Yeah, but you sounded like a fascistic dictator. when you were meant to be a little girl. And when you did sound like a little girl, it was deeply sinister. So I think we did you a favour. Yeah, I think everybody's the winner there.

5:15Dominic Sandbrook: So My Brilliant Friend, it's the first of the Neapolitan Quartet. It was published in Italy in 2011 and then brought out in translation by Anne Goldstein in Britain and in the US in 2012. And with that reading, with that passage that Tabby read, which comes quite early on in the book, we get to the heart of the very fraught, close, complicated relationship between these two girls. Our narrator, Elena Greco, or Lenu, and Lila Cerullo, her friend Lila, who we're led to think is the brilliant friend of the title. And they're growing up in Naples at the beginning of the 1950s. So Tabby, you hadn't read this before, had you, before we did this?

5:56Dominic Sandbrook: So you just finished reading it, as have I. What was your first reaction to it? What did you make of it all? First off, it was such a treat to read something for the first time. It's quite rare that we've done that on this show. and I just thoroughly enjoyed it. It is infinitely readable. It's also, I think, particularly if you're a female reader, I think you can enjoy it very, very much as a male reader. There's all sorts to, you know, pick apart. The context, Naples comes alive in it in an extraordinary way. The community that they live in. As a girl, it's incredibly relatable because it's in many ways a coming of age story and it brilliantly captures the complexities of female friendships I think um so I thoroughly enjoyed it there's massive hype around this book um both you know Aaliyah our producer Nicole our producer they love it so many people I know love it so I was interested to see if it lived up to the hype and yeah I think we'll discuss that at the end of the episode but what about you because it was the first time reading it for you too first time for me like you um I had read a lot about the hype so first of all the mystery about Elena which we'll come to because she you know she's writing under a nom de plume she's effectively hiding behind a borrowed identity so who is she some people are fascinated by that but for me more interesting is whether the book would live up to its reputation so the new york times did a massive survey of critics a few years ago and named it the best book of the 20 the best book in any language of the entire of the 21st century and it wasn't just critics it was fellow authors it was you know i don't know if you can have experts yes um reading it would be them exactly and um and us well we were we were not invited we know and asked us it's important to be clear um i really enjoyed it i whipped through it in a couple of days at first when i was about halfway through i just got nothing else to do um when i was about halfway through i thought I'm enjoying it but I'm wondering what all the fuss is about when I got to the end you know it's there were bits of it that kind of stayed with me and I started to rethink what I'd read which is always a sign of a good book I think when you go when you when you're almost tempted to go back and start reading again from the beginning because you'll notice things so particularly about the relationship between the two girls by the end of the book I think you see it in a different light a lot of your expectations have been overturned so I love that about it and yeah by and large I really really enjoyed it it's interesting though because if I hadn't done this podcast I probably would never have read it because I think it is probably projected by the it is projected by the publisher and indeed by the sort of literary industry generally as a book by a woman about women for women yeah I think that does it an injustice and not that that's not a good thing I agree but I think it's it's very I think as a male reader who might be suspicious of reading it there is so much to enjoy in this book not least as you say the world of Naples in the 1950s absolutely and it is thrilling but you say they're a book kind of for women by a in many ways Eleanor Ferrante the writer of this book is the most mysterious author we've ever done on the book club because as you say no one knows who she is Eleanor Ferrante is just a pseudonym And she's kept her identity private for 30 years, claiming that this anonymity is a crucial aspect of kind of her process as a writer, that a book should be understood and read and understood without the figure of the author clouding it in a reader's mind.

9:34she has given loads of email interviews over the years and in those she's often fictionalized her background as a false identity which is very interesting so i think she said at one point that she was the daughter of a neapolitan seamstress that naples had defined her childhood and her adolescence and early adulthood that she had sisters so this is very clever i mean you could if you're being very cynical you could say it's an ingenious marketing ploy because obviously you're buying into the sense that this is a person who really knows about the world she's

10:10Dominic Sandbrook: writing about why are we are you suggesting that she's not those things that this is a fiction from her it's an interesting concept in itself this we're obviously a book show we have spent a lot of time digging into the authors behind the book sometimes in order to shed light upon the book that we're discussing for instance we discussed when we did the portrait of doran gray we discussed Oscar Wilde's kind of dual identity and how that comes out in the book we discussed Emily Bronte yeah Orwell or whoever Orwell or whatever it is so it's an interesting phenomenon for us to be doing a book in which the author is unknown and you could argue oh is it an ethical dilemma you know should we be digging into it at all so I think what we should do is just go run through the most famous candidates and then I don't think I mean I'm not going to reach my own conclusions because i don't i don't find that i care that much about who she is but it's it's an intriguing mystery nevertheless it's kind of a parlor game isn't it that um uh people are fast because the books are such hits people are fascinated by who elena ferranti might be and so if you go online and you google her you can read all sorts of articles in newspapers about who she might be there are some people who think well she's so deeply immersed in the world of naples in the 1950s that perhaps she is a historian so uh there's a writer called marcella marmo and people think well maybe it's a historian from naples maybe it's marcella marmo it seems very unlikely because it's not really a historical novel is it i mean the the history is not the point um one of the one of the interesting candidates so interesting is a man so this book is so laden with female sensibility so the so the idea that it could be a man you could say on the one hand my god he's a genius if it if he were a man for managing to capture this female world and the delicacies of female relationships so well or you know you could say again great marketing because if it if it were a man writing it it's much easier to sell of course if it's a woman but men are perfectly capable of writing about women's of course well i mean but this is the this is the point that i think we'll get to yeah well anyway there's a guy that some some people have pointed the finger at he's an italian writer and journalist called dominico starnoni but i think the the way that they tried to that they could that they came to the conclusion it was him is so interesting because it's people taking something to a massive degree to an extreme degree so they analyzed the grammar and punctuation of vocabulary of the book they did a sort of computer survey of it they compared it with 150 books by 40 other contemporary italian writers and they said the style that ferrante is closest to is that of this bloke starnoni and therefore it's him which i think is very spurious by the way i agree i agree but then there's another um intriguing possibility which is that starnoni wrote it in in collaboration with his wife, given that both of them were born in Naples and his upbringing resembles that of the two main characters in the novel.

13:08And then this leads us to the most popular conclusion about who Ferrante is. So when I was digging into this, I read an interview with the guy that reached this conclusion. And it was a fascinating read because basically there's this journalist called Claudio Gatti who did a massive investigation in order to try to uncover Ferrante's identity and he went he took this to he took this very far he used financial records he traced payments from the publisher who publishes these books he looked at real estate purchases transfers whatever it is and so because of this Ferrante's fans really came after him because they said you have no right she has said that she wants to be anonymous you can't just you know lift the lid on someone's and on who someone is when they don't want to be revealed And he defended himself on the basis that he said that she had basically sprinkled a false bread trail about who she was by saying that she came from Naples, that she grew up in Naples, that she was grounded in this world.

14:10And therefore, it was his right to tell people the truth. Why don't you tell the listeners who we're talking about here?

14:18Dominic Sandbrook: He looked at all his financial records and he came to the conclusion Elena Ferrante was a translator called Anita Raja. And she was not raised in Naples. She was raised in Rome. She was born in Naples, but raised in Rome. Yeah. And her speciality was is translating German literature, which will please Alia, our German producer. Very much. Into Italian. So she did Kafka and she specialized in a writer called Christa Wolf. actually there was a piece in the new york times that said you know people have actually in italy deep down have known for a long time that anita raja is ferrante literary circles in italy are quite small and quite tight so basically everybody kind of knew it was an open secret it's just not really well known outside italy but there's a twist isn't there because yeah who is anita raja married to she's married to dominico starnone the man that people said had been writing these novels And to be honest, there is so this this debate that runs on and on and on.

15:11It really does. People people haven't reached definitive conclusions or anything like that. And I think our brilliant newsletter book club notes is going to do a deep dive into this. So sign up to that. The question itself doesn't really bother or interest me very much. It's intriguing, knowing, you know, trying to uncover someone's identity is always intriguing, but it doesn't affect for me the reading of this book in any way. when I read it this time I thought not at all about Eleanor Ferrante and who she was and I don't care either about not finding out you know I was reading things online saying that it would really it would really ruin the books if they discovered who Ferrante was and I just think that you know most of the time we read books knowing who the author is and it doesn't change the experience and she is not the first author to have a nom de plume no of course to any extent

15:56Dominic Sandbrook: well we talked about Emily Bronte of course Ellis Bell right I mean George Eliot exactly yeah and And while obviously, you know, if you are studying a historical author, it can help to shed light on the issues, the themes, the concerns woven into the narrative. But a story can be a story without that, in my opinion. And writers, I think, should always be able to write about things that they haven't experienced. You know, it's a work of imagination. It's a work of creative endeavor. Of course. and so for me if I feel to feel understood by a book or to feel that I can relate to it is very different to seeking to understand it from kind of an analytical perspective so I don't really care either way I think and I do actually respect her decision to want to stay anonymous in this kind of world of promotion where people are constantly trying to weave a version of themselves in order to sell things yeah so it's interesting because we are you know at a point in kind of the history of literary culture where authors are put under enormous pressure by the publishers to sell themselves particularly on social media you know they will actually they're more likely to sign you up as an author if you already have a very popular instagram account or whatever so that makes her an outlier i think there are two aspects to this so one is if you come to the book knowing nothing of the author a book like this i think you are actually more likely to immerse yourself in the in the reality of the characters i think you are more likely to suspend your disbelief as it were because you're less aware of the process of construction it's as though the book has come to you fully formed perfectly and nobody actually wrote it there is no elena france there is just the book so you throw yourself into the world of these two women and i think in a way that you might not if you're conscious of the puppet master as it were and then the other thing i think that is obviously an aspect with this particular book is that naples in the 50s is such an important part of the story and obviously if elena franti was not raised in naples then for some readers i think that would compromise the supposed authenticity of the book so you can understand why she would want to keep her identity secret because she doesn't want it to be you know she doesn't want to just sort of admit to everybody this is a literary fiction it's a construct and I made all this up because we we want to you know people are so invested emotionally in the story of Lenu and Leela aren't they and if you're aware that there's someone pulling the strings that will for some readers I think that would spoil it for them yeah I suppose so but you know the part of the genius of the book is Naples and the way that she captures that world and that kind of gritty surrounding but it is also about two girls and and growing up as a girl and the female friendships and she manages to get that and if it is you know I'm sure she experienced that if it if she is a woman so I do get it but also I genuinely do think that people should almost always you know I don't think you can write beloved if you're not Toni Morrison but people should almost always be able to write about that which they have not experienced.

18:56Dominic Sandbrook: Should we talk a little bit about the book in itself and give people a sense of it so i know some people listen to these episodes before reading the books so this we're always playing a there's always a slightly delicate dance with spoilers however just to give an outline of the story the book is narrated by elena greco so we'll just call her elena um she's lenu as well so names kind of change across the course of the book as the character's age and whatnot and elena is telling us about her childhood and her teenage years in Naples in a sort of sub sort of working class suburb in the east of Naples very gritty interestingly there's not many kind of visual descriptions of this world but our sense of it is very vivid isn't it because it's particularly defined by the relationships the characters you get a real sense of what it would be like to to grow up there so the story starts in 2010 Elena is elderly she gets a phone call from her old friend Lena's son and he says my mother has disappeared Elena's not surprised she says well I always knew Lila wanted to disappear and that she would one day and she breaks disperse her to break a promise she always said I'd never write about our friendship but she says well I will write about our friendship now and so she writes this account of their lives up to the age of 16 doesn't she and then we move back to the 1950s and we are in this neighborhood in Naples and Elena is describing herself her friend Lila they go to school they become they go through puberty and adolescence they fall in love with boys they kind of yeah they fall out with each with each other they uh struggle with the physical and emotional changes of becoming a teenager but also their lives the choices they're making in their teens they move very soon after they leave childhood or really when they're still children their life choices are going to define them you know it's actually quite a bleep book in that sense like a wrong choice that you make when you're 15 or 16 sends your life down a course from which you will never be able to turn back because it's a much more brutal world i suppose people are much poorer they don't have they don't have the liberty of changing their minds later no exactly and i think a key to this book is the idea of the beginning they are subject to the violence of men they're subject to all kinds of pressures and expectations and they are chafing and they're trying to find identities for themselves and it's very difficult to do so and all of this is related to us through elena's subjectivity so everything that we know about their friendship the other characters the neighborhood is what elena is telling us and there was definitely a point for me when we're about two-thirds three-quarters of way through when i thought oh gosh maybe elena is wrong about lots of things and maybe so about her friend lila in particular do you not agree yeah definitely um and we'll get on to more of that later but for instance there's at the very end of the book we think that lila has um achieved kind of this great triumph over the neighborhood she's managed to elevate herself above it she's managed to escape poverty and the violence she's grown up with she's kind of made herself the the mistress of her own fate and we think that because that seems to be what elena thinks yes you know we are constantly in her mind and then we we have cause to question it because elena suddenly has cause to question and that means that we start to question everything she's ever thought so you know is leela's fate a tragedy or a triumph it's totally you know in um elena's recollection it's it's whatever she thinks but you you speak about the neighborhood and this story the whole plot is very much rooted in place of the world and politics of post-war Naples and sort of Italian culture and history infuses every aspect of it and as you say this this environment colors the girls upbringing and their attitudes to class gender art love but also it's brutal because it's totally indifferent to their struggles growing up as teenage girls dating whatever it may be and I think the genius is that Naples the neighborhood as it's called is kind of turned into a character in itself its facets its features its denizens are minutely explored throughout the course of the novel and this neighborhood it consumes people for the rest of their lives it has this kind of gravitational pull like a womb or something that you can't quite escape the the umbilical cord follows you through life and I think on Leela especially that as you say they're both chafing to get out of it to rise above their circumstances but it's also comforting and it's interesting because this is a world very much based on historical reality it's based on real life and I would say a very violent or certainly like difficult real life so let's dig into the historical Naples that Ferrante is describing.

23:55So we discussed in The Leopard two weeks ago about Italian unification. So Naples joins the unified Italy in 1861 after having been the capital of the independent kingdom of the two Sicilies, formerly ruled by the House of Bourbon. So it's no longer a major capital city and therefore it sees decline in its kind of its influence, its prestige, its wealth, and it becomes a bit of a symbol of the broader economic gap between the north and the south in Italy and then towards the end of the 19th century possibly because you know in part because of this large numbers of people begin to immigrate all over the world so especially to the US to Argentina to Brazil and then its history takes a particularly dark turn in the 20th century.

24:34Dominic Sandbrook: Of course Naples suffered really badly well yeah I mean obviously you have um Mussolini comes in in 1922 so Naples is part of the kind of fascist Italy the reign of the black shirts great great corruption in naples and so on and actually the shadow of fascism hangs over the book even though it's i think that this is one of the really nice things about this but when we think about 1950s 1960s italy in britain we think of the world of kind of um people on vespers yeah outside outside kind of ice cream parlors exporting vast quantities of spaghetti and marinara sauce to america right exactly and importing it too it is very cool it's a home of design it's kind of federico fellini films and stuff but in the book it's as though the the the shadow of fascism has never really gone away there everybody has a past and we'll come on to this point it's so cleverly done though because it's you know as a child or even as a teenager you're so self-obsessed you're so concerned with your own little world you don't think about the big picture and that's how it filters through in this fascism the shadow is it grows closer and closer and closer as more and more understanding exactly as the girls into the girls minds exactly as they as they start to realize the truth about some of the people that they've taken for granted all their lives anyway um naples suffered particularly badly in the second world war was bombed more than 100 times a lot of people killed vast swathes of the city destroyed by the allies so the allies arrive in the last couple of years of the war um and they find naples really a shell terrible poverty hunger near starvation effectively kids in rags mass prostitution to try to make ends meet there's a typhus epidemic all of this kind of thing because basically although the rich people have got out the poorer people of naples of whom there are very many have been trapped in the city and just before the germans had left they destroyed all the utilities is you know naples was a war zone and then when the allies arrive there's this black market that's flourishes there is all kinds of corruption it's a sort of sink of criminality and it becomes in allied reporting this sort of byword for the horrors of war the terror of the civilian population all of this kind of thing and the way in which crime and vice can thrive in the ruins of the 20th century basically yeah and this is also a feature of the book and it is manifested by this family called the solaras so it's the the patriarch is this guy called silvio and his sons are marcello and michaeli and they are the most prominent crime family in the neighborhood and they benefit enormously from this underhand black market this is what they build their wealth on and they sort of come to embody the camora so this is the neapolitan mafia mafia is kind of on the rise at this time because of this black market because you know the traditional structures have been dismantled and they it's so interesting if they at first we see them as the girls would see them so they at first don't seem that threatening they just seem like stupid boys who drive up in their fancy car and chat up the girls and they grow more and more frightening as the book progresses for instance Marcello at one point almost tries to bribe or force Leela into marriage by he buys her family TVs or he sort of gets quite aggressive with her physically so that element of history is also very much present in the story.

28:04Dominic Sandbrook: So Naples basically it's a wreck in the late 1940s and then it starts to revive in the 1950s and that is you see that kind of trace through the book but what had happened was that a lot of kids uh are if you're from a poor family the expectation is that you will not necessarily you know you will you will stay at home to help your parents and to you'll become economically useful as quickly as possible and this is obviously what happens to Lila because Lila does not you know she drops out of education the very first opportunity because her parents want her to help in the shop they're shoemakers they they repair shoes effectively and of course across naples you have you know if you read reports in the 1940s and 50s you have all these families who are living in you know basically battered buildings like a family in an entire room they can't shoes exactly all of that stuff at the same time though as the italian economy is starting to get back on its feet there are all kinds of new opportunities opening up the city is run by a guy who was mentioned a couple of times i think in the book he was called the commandant the commandante the commander or whatever Achille Lauro he was a former fascist very keen fascist he then became a right-wing politician sort of more conventional right-wing politician but actually went back towards neo-fascism in the 1970s and he completely dominated the politics of Naples in the 1950s so there's loads going on there's loads of stuff in the book about class and status yeah and it's perfectly captured actually fittingly for a great work of fiction in language because one thing that comes you said in your opening reading yeah i noticed you didn't put on a neapolitan dialect i was i was put i was so scarred by watching you do it that i i couldn't put myself through the humiliation this doesn't reflect well on me at all okay but lila when lila speaks in your introduction elena sandbrook you get so you you take that you get far too much pleasure from this tabby that's all i'm gonna say leader speaks in dialect when she says you don't care about her she's speaking in the she's speaking in neapolitan dialect and there are lots of references to that through the book oh i switched to italian oh i went back to neapolitan and this is really important because we think of outsiders think of italy as a you know a culturally united country in which everybody speaks italian of course that's not the reality because it's only united into one country in the 19th century which is what we talked about the leopard and somewhere like naples the working class of naples speak their own dialect which is often unintelligible to an italian outsider from the north or at least an italian outsider might struggle to understand what's being said and the characters their neapolitan dialect is them it is their author it's their authentic selves it is the language of the neighborhood but at times they kind of code switch to some of them at least elena in particular because she's educated to speaking in a more formal italian and that is a marker of difference and of status and of prestige and so on and of education yeah it's power i suppose you are more powerful if you can do both yeah and elena uses this almost as a weapon against Lena at times.

31:21So when she's speaking to a guy that she has a crush on, a very intellectual guy, she will use it to try and show off. But then with Lena, she will use it almost to put herself above her. So they'll be in the middle of a conversation, they'll be speaking dialect and then she'll switch consciously into Italian. And it makes her feel like she has one up over Lena. And Lena does it too as well. But in fact, the interesting thing is the whole book, in a sense, is Elena's attempt to take back control over Lena because as the narrator she automatically has the power she can possess her because she is creating her she is describing her she is shaping our perceptions of both of them and this makes her an extremely unreliable narrator but it also infuses the book with this kind of electric current because you're constantly unsure of what is truth and what is a kind of false reality a conjured reality so we can't know to what extent lila is as she is in sort of real life or an exaggeration because because there is something almost something of a heroine or anti-hero in a fable about her i agree completely so and even even the title

32:34Dominic Sandbrook: my brilliant my brilliant friend and the way in which they're described there's a slight fairy tale quality to their first meeting and their friendship exactly and the thing with the dolls exactly you almost expect lena to do the things that she does because in elena's eyes she is sort of indomitable she's untouchable she's perfect she's beautiful she is cat-like she's withdrawn she is clever and aggressive so she says at one point she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension she intensified reality as she reduced it to words she injected it with energy and you wonder oh is elena doing that with lena is she injecting her with a power that she did not in fact possess so we can't know is is leela in fact as cruel as she comes across or merely seen through the eyes of her competitor is elena telling the truth or is she in a sense manufacturing a character are leela's strengths merely elena's insecurities and a projection of her own fears and both characters come across as incredibly psychologically complex but i think elena actually more so because as the narrator she's witness admirer and rival and we have to see her and understand her almost in spite of herself i agree completely i think it's really so we've talked about in this um show about a lot of books in which there's a kind of doubling so the great gatsby you have nick and gatsby um you have all the different all the characters in weathering heights who are basically all doubles of each other and i kind of remember the haiton and hindley or whatever whatever they've all got the same name anyway in this book what's so interesting is you have these two girls who are kind of doubles both of them have two names because I noticed when you were talking without even knowing it you were switching between different names so we have our narrator who is Elena or Lenu and we have the person she is describing her friend who is Lila or Lina and the the narrative slightly moves at times depending on who's talking between them it's as though their identities I think are not really fixed and there are different sides to their personality that are kind of brought out by the different names but also what's complicated about it is because we don't have a third person narrator because it's not somebody else telling us the story it's just elena exactly as you say her friend had leela she exists for us only as a construct of kind of elena's imagination it's only what elena is telling us about leela it's only through that that we see her and so elena will say you that thing that you read she took the facts and charged them attention she intensified reality she injected it with energy she tells us things like that often oh lila was brilliant she made you know she feel alive she crackled with energy she was this often we don't really see that we're just told it and we have to kind of take it on trust but also it's really interesting because um they're kind of held up as foils even physically one is golden head and and sort of curvy the other one is um androgynous and dark elena our narrator is quite insecure she's quite wistful she's quite romantic she can be mean but not as overtly as Lila whereas Lila is kind of hard and cold and you think calculating or so it seems and so they're kind of hold up held up as pillars of opposition Elena certainly and then we kind of later discover Lena too they kind of are actually all along they're molding themselves into each other so it's the very opposite of opposition they're like they're liquid they're fluid they are sort of melding into one another the whole time which is very interesting first of all they're mimicking each other but also they are even though they don't kind of admit it they're rivals aren't they and they define they define each other against each other but just on elena as we approach the break i mean she's an excellent narrator i think because she's like she's like a really good example of a narrator who perhaps to some degree can't work it can't work out quite what's going on she's discovering things that make us look at her story in a different light you're reminded at points that this is her memory as well this is her telling the story from years in the future a narrative voice sometimes kind of slips between the voice of somebody who's 12 years old yes you're telling us what a 12 year old sees and the voice of an older woman who is reflecting on it much later and is able to see things that she perhaps didn't when she's when she's 12 she's very reflective she's very self-aware she is full of self-doubt of course but at the same time she kind of can't be full of self-doubt by comparison with other people in the neighborhood because she's very successful she goes to school she does brilliantly she makes a point of telling us all the marks that she got at school when she did slightly disappointingly i mean she never does badly when she only gets a seven out of ten or when she gets all tens she tells she makes a point of telling us going to school makes her feel different in some ways makes her feel an outsider makes feel lesser than the people in the neighborhood but of course all the time the further she goes in school the higher above them she is rising and the greater her opportunities will be you know she's going to have a better life as a result of it and she actually flourishes when she's not near the neighborhood because she feels the pressures the expectations of that world of her family of her neighbors and so she goes on holiday at one point and she gets she feels happy she gets beautiful she kind of she She actually looks golden and glowing, but she's constantly has a slight strain of self-pity about her as though she has Lila has the upper hand and she is always kind of Lila's apostle or lesser.

38:00She underplays her own achievements, we think. And yet, as you say, she always tells us about them. And then it kind of turns out that she may have a better prospect of leaving the neighborhood than Lila. She may actually be the brave one. But again, so much is unknown. and the other thing that's particularly unknown is we get this the impression that she's almost obsessed with Lila she speaks about her all the time she needs her to feel whole she needs the rivalry in a way she needs what what she perceives as Lila's brilliance but we can't know much of the time we get hints and the picture becomes clearer as we move through the book whether Lila feels the same way is Lila reacting to responding to everything Elena does is she jealous of her

38:43Dominic Sandbrook: does she watch her yeah so the brilliant friend Lila or is she well I guess we'll come to that why don't we take a break now and then we will come back and we will talk about whether Lila really is the brilliant friend after all are you looking for support in your weight management journey Zepbound Terzepatide may be able to help Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. ZepBound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection.

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42:10Dominic Sandbrook: Hi everybody, welcome back to The Book Club. So we promise to get to the heart of the novel. Leela, the character who we are led to believe is the brilliant friend and her relationship with Elena. So Leela's a great character, isn't she Tabby? She's very, as you described her before the break, she is very striking. She's androgynous. We are led to believe she has a cruel streak. She is almost omnipotent. You know, she's brilliant at everything, according to Elena. She is the master of every situation. She's always a step ahead of everybody else. There's a bit of her that is, I mean, she's not a terribly, you know, you'd be slightly nervous if you found yourself sitting next to her at a dinner, wouldn't you?

42:51Dominic Sandbrook: I mean, she's quite, can be quite chilly in some ways and almost malicious is too strong, but she's calculating and she's quite dark as a character. Yeah, she can be very aggressive. You know, at one point she pulls a knife on someone and she throws stones at the other boys. And as you say, at times she's almost a villain of the novel. So for instance, Elena writes, Leela was malicious. This in some secret place in myself, I still thought. she had shown me not only that she knew how to wound with words but that she would kill without hesitation and yet those capacities now seem to me of little importance I said to myself she will release something more vicious and I resorted to the word evil an exaggerated word that came to me from childhood tales and we have said right you know right from the start that there is something mythologized about Lena almost I mean I suppose she is a portrait of a person constructed by someone who has studied her and been sort of obsessed with her all her life and she's a fascinating contradiction in many ways and this contradiction becomes clearer and clearer as we move through the novel because in the beginning she just seems to be this real tomboy she has real grit she may be quite mean she's brilliant she's quite competitive but actually in many ways she's very childish she is more consumed by the neighborhood than we know and much more so than elena so at one point when they're little girls they decide that they will leave the neighborhood and they will go to the sea and it is Lena not Elena who turns them back because she's frightened she's frightened of leaving the comfort of her home and for instance later on when she's in a serious relationship and the other girls aren't we find out that she is the least sexually experienced of all of them again that means that makes her somehow inhuman you know she's not physical she's not embodied she's not rooted kind of in the mire of human trivialities she's something greater because she is in Elena's eyes and she's very clever but she unlike Elena isn't allowed to go to secondary school so she educates herself privately because she's very curious these are kind of the first hints that we get from that elena's recollections of her aren't entirely correct because she's so jealous of her throughout even though lila is working for her family and making shoes whatever it may be and elena is flourishing at school she's still jealous of her you know and she says at one point that even though she's educated and she's thriving she's very good at italian elena that is she reads something that lila writes and she's like this is genius it puts everything i've ever done to shame it has a raw native brilliance to it that i can never have although interestingly do you not think so elena who's the one who's gone to school who is clearly the more you know the fact that she's at school means that she's the more highly educated she keeps insisting to us well my friend leela who doesn't go to school is absolutely brilliant she has this native brilliance she has actually she's read you know all of these classical authors herself privately and she knows more than i ever will and all of this she but she tells us this but we're never shown it so for example she says about the writing you know leela's writing has this raw native genius and all of this but we're never given an example of the writing so we can't judge it for ourselves and actually i thought by the last quarter of the book i started to think elena has created a myth has created a fairy tale mythological friend for herself like an imaginary friend almost and actually maybe Leela is a much more anxious frightened insecure person than we have been led to believe and actually I think that really comes out towards the end of the book yeah that's definitely definitely true but there's this kind of it's like they're both climbing a ladder at the same time and at one point one will be a rung ahead and another point the other one will be a rung ahead and for instance you speak of the fact that Lila might actually be the more vulnerable one when they hit puberty Elena develops very quickly and she feels good about this her body develops she has breasts of course she's very confused but it kind of makes her feel like she's above Lila because Lila remains a little girl physically and you don't really see Lila's side but then you kind of think oh you know I wonder if she kind of felt left out and behind because she's not going to school and she's physically behind everyone else and then Lila flourishes and she's fancied by everyone she's beautiful and elena automatically feels lesser again so it's like a rope the whole time they're winding around each other and this push and pull it's the tension of the novel it keeps the plot moving the whole time down period up period down period up period um because it's them growing up and you're never constant when you grow up you know there are periods when you really suffer and there are periods when you feel like you couldn't be doing better so in that it's very much just a coming of age story well mentioned coming of age stories but also the way in which they are i said the thing about um elena sort of constructing leela as a fictional character and they do have fictional characters at the back of their minds don't they because actually quite early on they mention another book about girls growing up that we've done on the show little women there's quite a lot of discussion about little women they love it they have a copy of it or something don't they which they read and they're very interested in it and elena she is in some ways like a character from little women she has gone to school she has educated herself she's raised herself up she seems to be a good girl as it were and so she's followed the model Lila is the bad girl who hasn't followed the little women model and who kind of rejects you know actually later on as in the whole series she kind of rejects literary models she throws things away and stuff and I think that sort of that good girl bad girl dynamic I mean it's such a trite cliche but that's obviously part of their self-image and that kind of runs through the book doesn't it yeah and i mean the book but you know that's that's kind of about them as as um opposites whatever but the i think the most intriguing part of the whole novel is is the actual friendship it's it's basically an anatomy of a friendship and it's really unforgiving at times because it's very complex there are layers of love jealousy empathy rivalry all bound up in one and they actually hurt each other.

48:57This is very un-Little Women. If Little Women is about friendship and a warm and loving female community and sisterhood, friendship is also very much the heart of this novel, but it is a much less forgiving iteration. And this is the genius of the novel because it is so complex and it's so ambiguous that the layers she manages to pack in and sort of dig into all the layers of female friendship. You know, it can be rivalry, it can be love, it can be empathy, it can be hate, it can be jealousy. The ability to be friends and enemies all at once. In Elena's case, to some degree, she's almost in love with Lena and that's almost why she comes across as this perfect, untouchable model of a person.

49:42They are so cruel to each other at times because they know each other so well, they know one another's vulnerabilities and weak points and they actually prod them. You know, they want to hurt each other. They want to weaken one another. And yet they continue to deeply care for each other. Elena says at one point when she's on holiday and Lena is suffering back in the in the neighborhood. I was afraid of what was happening to her, good or bad, in my absence. It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me. The fear that in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance. and you can see um the codependency there the sense that her identity is woven into whatever it is that Lila is doing whatever it is that Lila is experiencing so we were just talking

50:22Dominic Sandbrook: beforehand weren't we with Lila um who loves this book our producer and she was saying her theory is that um Elena is kind of in love with Lila I mean she's definitely in love with the idea of her with the idea of her being brilliant and there is a slight element of a crush I think at times But also I think she's quite idealistic, Elena, I think. There's a guy we were also speaking about called Nino Salvatore. And she's obsessed with the idea of him too. Yes, because he's a communist and he's kind of clever and he's older. And for instance, she constantly speaks about, she's reading the Aeneid and she speaks about Dido the whole time.

50:56And the idea of that love, mythologised love. Pining for this guy, exactly.

51:01Dominic Sandbrook: But just, I think your point about friendship is the key for a lot of readers to this book. because what this book is is a portrait of a relationship between two characters who are clearly you know on the surface the best of friends and they think of themselves that way but their friendship consists of layer upon layer of as you say resentment rivalry jealousy sometimes hatred they define each other they just define themselves against each other you have a phrase in your notes which i think is dead right which is like it's a dance and a duel which it absolutely is between the between the two of them but then of course there's the third character in the book which is naples itself so naples i mean their friendship exists within this ecosystem of of the city of naples and in particular well i say the city it's not really the city it's the neighborhood because when they go to the city center when they go to the naples that you go to as a tourist they are bewildered they're lost and they are they don't go there very often they don't even go to the sea very often elena explores it with her father at one point and it's a bit like stepping out of a sepia movie pleasantville or something stepping out of a sepia tone movie into kind of broad daylight and she's she's astonished by it and she's excited by it and that's when you really get a sense of how small their world is everyone knows everyone everyone has heard the rumors about everyone everyone's having an affair with someone you know yeah but do you not think that's what lies behind so lila has this thing that occurs to her this sort of experience of dissociation yeah i love this which she calls dissolving margins so I wonder whether that's her psychological reaction to the sense of the overbearing nature of the neighborhood it definitely definitely is it's it's a disassociative state which allows her to distance herself from the horrible things happening around her it's it's a form of detachment and that's when you really see just how vulnerable Lila is Elena never has to do this Elena is closely observing all the time and you can only closely observe something that is horrible if you already feel slightly untouched by it whereas in a way Leela is in the heart of the storm of the difficulties of this world and it's and and she's and she's fragile and she's vulnerable she has a fragile mental state and so she has to almost shut off her emotions shut off who she is and step away from it and it makes her seem chilly but in fact it's because she's so soft and porous so she had the impression that something absolutely material which had been present around her and around everyone and around everything forever but imperceptible was breaking down the outlines of persons and things and revealing itself so it's as though everything is kind of so it's now almost like an outer body experience where she's not there in the room or whatever what everything is going on i mean i do think part of that is because i mean she's the daughter of a shoemaker or a shoe repair bloke and she lives in the heart of distinction it is an important distinction because he shoes shoes this book is this book is about shoes the issue if you're repairing shoes or making new shoes it does matter yeah it does matter a lot anyway financial yeah exactly a big financial and sort of cultural differentiation because to be a shoe maker is to be it's more prestigious than to be a mere shoe repairer she's in the heart of the neighborhood and it you know she's under the control basically of her father and her brother and this is true generally of all the female characters in the book they are at the mercy of male violence aren't they yeah it's a male dominated world through and through we realize that basically a lot of them are beating up their they will hit their wives they will hit their daughters they hit their children there is a kind of unacknowledged latent brutality to this world and it's cyclical it repeats generation through generation yes exactly exactly and actually that you know the there's a there's a scene when um when lila's father fernando the shoe guy and her brother reno are having a massive argument about her in front of her whether she go to school will she not go to school and she never speaks in that argument and actually ends with the father hitting the brother in the face um and and it's decided without her having any any possible input at all exactly and you can see from that how the girls of the neighborhood are controlled and commodified so it's two men arguing about leela's fate and it is a fate that she ends up living out and it calls to mind the dolls from that opening reading you know they are flung into don this guy don achille's cellar who's kind of the bogeyman of the neighborhood it's sort of later revealed that he has ties to the mafia and yeah and and the black market and the dolls are kept prisoner in this powerful man's cellar and he's an older man and his cellar is full of debris and it's kind of symbolic of naples past and the traditional patriarchy that no one can quite escape that all these women are imprisoned in and the ghosts of the past all around the neighborhood layers upon layers of history well in naples above all you know the layers upon layers point so in naples if you go to naples you haven't been to naples i've never been no so if you go to naples it's one of the best places in the world to see literally layers of history so there are places in the center where you can go into a building and they'll say oh this is a medieval bit and then you go down a staircase underground and there's like an underground cellar and they'll say this was roman and then you go further down you're now in a kind of archaeological dig effectively and they're like and this was greek this was neapolis or whatever it is the original but also could like constrictive and um kind of claustrophobic making to have all those layers and layers and layers around you and if you are seeking to break free which both of these girls are to some degree it's much harder to do so because you have to wade through you know sedimentary rock practically can you wade through a rock i'm not sure you can but anyway i'll take you i'll take your points you can try bruised chins um well anyway uh i think that this point about the history in the past becoming pressing down upon them so when they're in what is it middle school so in the late 1950s they first become aware i mean i think this is so nicely observed it's the point at which as a child i think was you know child entering your teens you first become aware that there was a past before you that you're not the be all and end all and actually everybody else around you they're all prisoners of the past and of their history so there's one boy isn't there pasquale who is a communist and he sees this more clearly than the rest of them he sees that he says at one point the bar solara had always been a place for loan trucks from the camora it was a base for smuggling he said donna kile had been a spy for the nazi fascists he said the money that stefano was using to expand the grocery store his father had made on the black market and it's so basically the neighborhood is full of these secrets these unadmitted unacknowledged secrets that everybody is tainted by history that they've all done terrible things and the girls you know their dream is to escape it but they can't yeah and it's also it strikes it hits home because very little exposition is used in this book altogether so when it's spelled out it's very affecting and lila is more affected by this than elena the corruption that she's been growing up in and it almost serves as a sort of um a loss of innocence for her and it torments her and it sinks into her soul so she was gripped by a frenzy of absolute disclosure she she pointed to people things streets and said that man fought in the war and killed that one bludgeoned and administered car store that one turned in a lot of people that one starved his own mother so as you say again it's like the ghosts of the past are literally living around them so she identifies all these dirty secrets and is appalled by it and hurt by it and disgusted by it it's part of the reason that she refuses to marry Marcello Solara because he's part of this world he's leading it he's he's kind of figurehead of crime in the community yeah so there's that's the that's the prison for them and the story of the book in some ways i think is how they're both looking for escape so elena it's academic isn't it so she she feels i think she feels she's very boring because she's at school compared with some of her friends but leela on the other hand who doesn't get to continue at school she had as a girl dreamed of being a writer hadn't she and it's a it's a she had borrowed loads of books from the library and this is actually sad so she'd written a story about a blue fairy and the blue fairy would have been a very popular figure in 1950s italy because the blue fairy is a character in carlo collodi's pinocchio story pinocchio yeah is that your italian oh my yeah anyway so um actually interestingly lila's father is a shoemaker and in some later adaptations of the pinocchio story geppetto pinocchio's creator uh who's really a wood carver sometimes he's described as a shoemaker as well anyway the blue fairy in the story allows you know realizes the character's dreams realizes the hero's dreams allows pinocchio to become human and allows him to achieve his ideals and to escape from his wooden status and to become flesh and blood you've got to assume that that book's been chosen deliberately but that title's been chosen deliberately because it's symbolic of lila's desire to escape and to become fully realized and to become true to herself but she doesn't i mean spoiler alert she doesn't and actually that blue fairy story reappears in late in later books in the court neapolitan quartet and it's a very sad fate i won't spoil it but it's a kind of sad fate but there's a sense in which her reading and her writing have done nothing to advance her yeah books have failed her yeah and she ends up having to work in her father's shoe repair shop and then she comes up with rather i guess like geppetto working on pinocchio she comes up with something she a revolutionary shoe a revolutionary shoe so you didn't say that with respect that it deserves because the shoe is an important thing revolutionary shoe yeah revolutionary BBC dramas thank you um both cup it's both comfortable and adaptable as well as waterproof well it hasn't got a very large white toe sponsored by big shoe well literally a big shoe no it's yeah isn't the thing about this shoe that is slightly larger Well, it's simultaneously tight, too tight when people try it on.

1:01:25Dominic Sandbrook: But also people say the toe is very broad. So in my mind, whenever I think of the shoe, I think of a bit of a clown shoe. Me too. Yeah, me too. I think we're meant to take the shoe more seriously. Well, because the shoe actually does come to symbolise ambition. It's a way for Leela to transcend this cyclical reality of violence and kind of repression and expectation. And it's her artistic endeavour. but again in this she is quashed by her father and she must find another way out and what does she do like so many girls before her i guess she engineers she opts for marriage but in this case she engine she thinks that she is engineering herself and this is to stefano and he is the guy who is the son of the the former owner of the grocer shop and he has made lots of money and he's don achille's son no he's don achille's son exactly who was murdered but he seems pure she actually asks him at one point you're different right to these other guys and he says yeah yeah and he invests in um her father's shoe business and he seems to adore her he frames her original drawings of the shoes they kind of get very glamorous they wear fancy clothes they sort of they pretend to be john and jacqueline kennedy they're well off and elena says was this her latest invention did she want to leave the neighborhood while staying in the neighborhood i.e by marrying him lena can be wealthy she can be high status but she won't have to leave the home the place that she feels safest did she want to drag us out of ourselves tear off the old skin and put on a new one suitable for what she was inventing so elena is envious of of this there's a there's a very telling line i think elena says oh gosh my life isn't no leader's going to get married but i'm i'm a massive sadster and i'm still in school she actually says look what lena's achieved at the age of 16 she's gonna have babies soon she's getting married she looks great yeah and this is a i think this is a very nicely written section because of course as a reader you read this and you say no you fool you're the winner you want to be in school and not married and not have babies at 16 and poor old lila is going to be complete you know this is making a terrible choice and she is going to end up trapped and actually only a few pages later elena writes about lila being trapped in a cage the cage being stefano's family nevertheless it seems like a bit of a triumph for lila elena writes lila is somehow triumphant and we get to the wedding day and lila is it's like the end of a fairy tale i guess that moment where the married the prince and the princess drive off in the carriage lila is beautiful she's going to be wealthy everyone is jealous of her, admires her, she seems to be escaping the poverty that she's grown up with but then it starts to unravel in a really horrifying fashion as the wedding unfolds and Elena becomes aware of how she's been wrong all this time that she had been mistaken, Lila had remained there chained in a glaring way to that world from which she imagined she had taken the best in Stefano and she starts seeing the wedding guests and imagining them as Roman plebs fighting over food and wine and laughing at seeing jokes and quarreling on this dirty floor and elena feels like she's not part of it she's almost floating above it looking on i was kind of imagining a hogarth painting when i was when i was reading this i know exactly what you mean yeah and it's a sense of continuity that they can't escape you know the roman plebs still exist today yes and then you get the final shocking horrible image of the book it's so funny that you think this is so shocking and horrible i find it very depressing actually when i got to this when you describe it to people who haven't read the book they'll say i know what is that really that horrible but go on i mean i hate i hate to say this dominic but he's literally wearing the wrong pair of shoes he is wearing the wrong shoes so just describe the terrible image that the book ends with how shocking it is marcello solara turns up he is the mafiosi um guy who had courted lila and tried to pressure her into marrying him and it's partly to escape him that she marries um Stefano and then he turns up to the wedding and he is wearing the very special innovative waterproof and yet comfortable shoes that Lila had designed and and that she and her family had manufactured with money from her now husband Stefano so the unpredictable revealed itself only at one point I saw Lila lose her colour become as pale as when she was a child whiter than her wedding dress and her eyes had that sudden contraction that turned them into cracks she had in front of her a bottle of wine and I was afraid that her gaze would go through it with a violence that would shatter it with the wine spraying everywhere but she wasn't looking at the bottle she was looking farther away she was looking at the shoes of Marcello Solara they were they were Cirullo shoes for men these shoes so we find out that Pasquale was right all along that Stefano's money comes from as dirty a place as Marcello's that he is just as corrupt that he's just as bought into this world of historical violence and underhand dealings and fascism and that she is now tainted by that corruption too, that nothing has changed, that the Solaris are still in control and Leela is married to the man at the heart of it.

1:06:45Dominic Sandbrook: And that her wonderful creation, the creation into which she poured her talent and her idealism, these are now on the feet of the worst man in the neighborhood who is in cahoots clearly with her husband in some way and that she has her her art has just been appropriated and claimed and she has been dragged back and she has been trapped by naples and by the neighborhood she has been tainted you don't find that depressing it's so depressing i do i mean i do find it depressing of course i find it depressing i mean it's just the shoes no i just i think it was amusing when you said it's the most horrifying shocking image you've in fiction like very ugly shoes it's one thing i hate it's a bad shoe you're a big wearer of um what do you wear great shoes top no you always wear the same shoes nike what are they nike now you're not cool enough for nike they're um new balance you're a big wearer of new balance tragic yeah like george was born that always upsets me anyway i didn't know tabby you were paying so much attention to my shoes i'll mix it up a little shoes i'll try to mix it up a bit in future yeah so just before we come to the conclusion the title my brilliant friend i had always thought because i'm a very sluggish and slow and foolish reader i had thought through much of the book my brilliant friend is clearly leela elena is telling us about her brilliant friend but actually the words my brilliant friend are only used in the book the other way around towards the end you know the wedding scene the set piece that ends the book brilliantly done on her wedding morning leela is going to take a bath she's naked and she's vulnerable it's the only time that elena sees her friend naked and she's struck by how childlike she looks actually and vulnerable yeah and vulnerable and elena is about to wash her and leela says to her uh you are my brilliant friend you have to be the best of us all boys and girls and i thought gosh this is so clever i mean maybe this is because i'm very simplistic but i thought this is this is so clever that actually all along we have thought that leela was the brilliant friend but really the brilliant friend is Elena and she has misunderstood her own story the tragedy of this story really is you know that the tragedy is actually not what's happening to her it's what's happening to Leela Leela perhaps was not never as brilliant deep down but Elena projected that onto her and poor old Leela has been dragged down and has made terrible choices and has been claimed by Naples you also discover that um Elena has been just as jealous of Elena as the other way around all along because she said she reads something that Elena has Elena has written at one point and she says you know I just you write very well you know I can't read anymore because it hurts me you know that jealousy that envy it hurts her it doesn't spur her on to greater things in a way like it does for Elena this rivalry this competitiveness it makes her back off and makes her a treat that possibly Elena the character who we always thought of as gentler and softer and more reflective that actually maybe she is the harder of the two after all the more resilient this is what struck me okay so it was obviously a colossal hit we said already the new york times said it was the best book of the 21st century so should we give our verdicts shall i go first or do you want to go first i'll go first i thought it i think it's a really really um good book i think it's very cleverly written i enjoyed i actually enjoyed talking about it this is a terrible thing to admit to you tabby because you'll probably lord it over me for ages i enjoyed talking about it as much as i enjoyed reading it really but that's because that's i mean that's because i'm a great conversationalist the great level of banter um shoe based banter um however will i continue with the rest of the series i'm not sure i don't i don't quite think i mean i don't think it's the best book of the 21st century um i think it's a very beautifully observed portrait of female friendship i think it does lots of clever things with narration and i i like i mean you know it's the kind of book that you read it and halfway through you start googling like flights to naples because you're kind of immersed in that yeah really yeah i think so i've been i mean i've been to naples and i really enjoyed it um i like the frisson of danger on a holiday i was gonna say i was gonna say if ever the matthew is gonna recruit one of us it would be you um so how many um innovatively comfortable shoes would you give it out of 10 clown shoes out of 10 um i'm gonna give it i'm gonna give it eight actually which i know leah will be cross because she loves it but i'm gonna give it eight what about you good for you um so i agree i don't think i would put it at the top of the best 100 novels of the 21st century by any means um i don't think it's groundbreaking but i thought it was really good And if I didn't have to get on and read the next book for the show, I would have just eaten up the next three books in the series because it describes what is undoubtedly an alien world for most people.

1:11:44but in the in its kind of very intuitive and very raw portrait of two girls growing up it's it's extraordinarily relatable um you know it captures without any drama or cliche the mundane and at the time all-consuming worries of becoming a teenager when you're a girl of of seeing yourself and the world around you kind of change it's captures brilliantly the ambivalence of friendships and how poisonous it can sometimes be and yet how loving I think the prose is good it's clear it's it's sharp it's quick it's not groundbreaking and also because I think part of the reason that it it means so much to so many people is that over the course of the four books you watch these two characters go up and that always plants a series in a reader's heart more than anything so I did really enjoy it i thought it was brilliant i didn't think it was the best book of the 21st century um so i'm gonna give it a nine nine okay that's nice and high all right so there's going to

1:12:47Dominic Sandbrook: be lots more about this book if you're interested in reading about elena franti and the story behind it in our book club notes so for those of you who don't know this is our weekly newsletter you get all kinds of talking points you get book recommendations we also have loads of listener feedback so you can email in and send us your thoughts so it's our very own book club community tabby yeah exactly much like um the neapolitan neighborhood from this book our very own uh sinister and threatening neighborhood so if you would like to get a free copy of the weekly newsletter so it'll arrive on saturday in your inbox you just go to thebookclubhq.com and sign up that's thebookclubhq.com and you'll get uh the book club notes and you can send in your thoughts you can suggest new books you can do all kinds of fun things you can give your rating give your rating exactly now we have taken actually loads of listener suggestions for future books so so tabby tell us give us a a big insight into what is coming so what do we have coming up we have brave new world by aldous huxley we have for whom the bell tolls by ernest hemingway so many people suggested that.

1:13:58We have Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. We have Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr. American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Goldfinger by Ian Fleming. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. White Nights by Theodore Dostoevsky. And The Shining by Stephen King. Such a sexy line-up.

1:14:24Dominic Sandbrook: loads of reading to get on with there brilliant i'm gonna go and start reading brave new world right away tabby that's sad all right well i've got what else am i gonna do try on some new shoes on that shoe based uh note um goodbye

1:14:51Dominic Sandbrook: Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it. layer by layer until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.