The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

I’m now officially hooked on Elena Ferrante. This is the second of the four novels charting the lives of Lina (My Brilliant Friend) and Lenu, the girls from Naples whose lives take such different paths yet whose friendships remains intact. In this novel Lenu continues on to university in Pisa, struggling to accommodate the two very different cultures she finds herself living in. The emotion in these books, the suffering, the sense of loss and loss of hope, the glimmers of a possible future for Lenu, are gut wrenching but marvelous. Onto the next in the series.