A deluxe cloth hardcover with sprayed edges and colored end papers illustrating the Bay of Naples.

#1 BEST BOOK OF THE CENTURY —NEW YORK TIMES

“An unconditional masterpiece.” —Jhumpa Lahiri 

When Elena Ferrante set out to write the story of Elena and Lila, she conceived it as one single work of fiction, one expansive novel that would capture the reality and ambivalence of female friendship, motherhood, marriage, class and adolescence.  

2025 marks 10 years since publication of the quartet was completed. To celebrate this anniversary, as well as honor and acknowledge the author’s original conception, we are releasing the four novels in one volume.    

Described by the New Yorker’s James Wood as “large, captivating, amiably peopled...a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal,” the Neapolitan Quartet tells a poignant, universal story about friendship and belonging.   

“The capacity of stories to speak to anyone and in any time is the fruit of a mysterious mixture of sensibility, ability, and luck, and no writer really knows how that fruit ripens and if it has fully matured.” —Elena Ferrante 

Contains the four Neapolitan Novels: My Brilliant Friend; The Story of a New Name; Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay; The Story of the Lost Child

BARNES & NOBLE 2025 BOOK OF THE YEAR

A TOP TEN INDIE NEXT PICK

Ten-year-old Mona and her beloved grandfather have only fifty-two Wednesdays to visit fifty-two works of art and commit to memory “all that is beautiful in the world” before Mona loses her sight forever.

While the doctors can find no explanation for Mona’s brief episode of blindness, they agree that the threat of permanent vision loss cannot be ruled out. The girl’s grandfather, Henry, may not be able to stop his granddaughter from losing her sight, but he can fill the encroaching darkness with beauty. Every Wednesday for a year, the pair abscond together and visit a single masterpiece in one of Paris’s renowned museums. From Botticelli to Basquiat, Mona learns how each artist’s work shaped the world around them. In turn, the young girl’s world is changed forever by the power of their art. Under the kind and careful tutelage of her grandfather, Mona learns the true meaning of generosity, melancholy, love, loss, and revolution. Her perspective will never be the same—nor will the reader’s.

Mona’s Eyes is a heartfelt, enlightening journey across five centuries of Western art history. With the emotional impact of The Elegance of the Hedgehog and the readability of The Little Paris Bookshop, Thomas Schlesser’s sensational debut novel is at once a moving book about the beauty of life and a deeply touching story about the special bond between a girl and her grandfather.

“Vibrant debut ... Schlesser seamlessly interweaves the art lessons with Mona’s story... Readers of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie's World will love this.”—Publishers Weekly

Discover all 52 masterpieces inside the fold-out dustjacket.

At once a subversive autobiography of a mercurial woman and a mesmerizing history of the body as a site of resistance to power.

“I bite my friends to heal them.”—Diogenes the Cynic, c. 350 BCE

From a Roman amphitheater where 4th century martyrs are fed to wild beasts to the S&M leather bars of New York in the 1970s, this sinuous and illuminating book by novelist and cultural critic Fernanda Eberstadt explore the lives of uncommonly brave men and women—saints, philosophers, artists--who have used their own wounded or stigmatized bodies to challenge society’s mores and entrenched power structures.

The Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes who lived “a dog’s life,” sleeping, teaching, having sex in the public square; Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, two early Christian martyrs; twentieth-century prophets of bodily freedom like filmmaker-poet Pier Paolo Pasolini and philosopher Michel Foucault; Russian punk feminist group Pussy Riot; the political artist Piotr Pavlensky, who nailed his scrotum to the pavement of Red Square to protest Vladimir Putin’s tyranny; these are the outrageous, uncommon, but deeply committed activists featured through original interviews and careful case studies in Eberstadt’s immensely readable book, which is part political treatise, part manifesto, part memoir.

Running through her narrative of the Body Militant is Eberstadt’s own story and the story of her mother, a New York writer and glamor figure of the 1960s, whose illness-scarred body first led Eberstadt to seek connections between beauty, belief, and the truths taught through the body.

Eberstadt asks crucial questions for our time: what drives certain individuals to risk pain, disgrace, even death, in the name of freedom? And, what can we learn from their example to become braver ourselves?

From prize-winning author Su Bristow comes a fascinating coming-of-age novel about magic and the choices that define future generations.

It’s 1959. To eight-year-old Felicity—who lives on a dying farm in England—the fairies in the woods have much more to offer than the people in her everyday life. As she becomes more rooted in their world, she learns that their magic is far from safe. Their queen, Elfrida, offers Felicity a gift. But fairy bargains are never what they seem.

As an adult, Felicity leaves for university. Unfortunately, books are not her only company at school: Elfrida and Hobb—the queen’s constant companions—wield the ability to appear at any time, causing havoc in her new friendships and love life. Desperate, Felicity finally begins to explore the true nature of the Fair Folk and their magic. Her ally, the folklorist Professor Edgerley, asks, “What do they want from you?” The answer lies in the distant past, and in the secrets of her own family.

As the consequences of the “gift” play out, Felicity must draw on her courage to confront Elfrida, and make the right choice. Interwoven with traditional stories and striking characters, The Fair Folk poses questions about how we care for our children, our land, and our love-hate relationship with what we desire most.

A sweeping, multigenerational novel of art, exile, memory, and the enduring legacies of war—set between London and Baghdad in the shadow of the Islamic State’s rise. 

In the autumn of 2014, as the Islamic State tightens its grip on Iraq and images of cultural destruction flood the airwaves, three estranged Iraqi-British sisters are pulled back into each other’s orbit by the sudden discovery of their late father’s long-lost paintings. Beautiful, elusive Zainab; embittered, practical Mediha; and headstrong, queer Ishtar each lay claim to his legacy—an artistic and personal inheritance entwined with betrayal, exile, and a homeland they no longer recognize. 

Told in four parts—Archive Fever, Prisons of Hope, Carcasses of Home, and Where the Rivers Meet—Floodlines traces the emotional and political aftershocks of the US-led invasion of Iraq and the rise and fall of Saddam’s regime. As the sisters fight to preserve, erase, or repurpose the past, Zainab’s estranged son Nizar, a war correspondent haunted by trauma and heartbreak, returns to the family fold. With the reemergence of buried memories comes a reckoning: with nationhood, with mental health, with generational wounds too long left unspoken. 

Spanning continents and decades—from 1950s Baghdad to contemporary London, from the Tigris River to Yemeni refugee camps—Floodlines is at once intimate and epic in scope. Haddad’s textured prose and profound insight explore queerness in Arab culture, the role of art in survival and resistance, and the lingering, often invisible scars of colonialism and diaspora. 

Inspired by the author’s own family history and the artistic legacy of his great uncle, Jewad Saleem—pioneer of the Baghdad Modern Art Group—Floodlines is a rare novel that bridges the personal and the political, the historic and the immediate. It is a powerful meditation on what it means to belong, to create, to endure. 

A searing story of identity, ambition, and the cost of leaving home, from one of Italy’s most vital contemporary voices

Gabriele left Rome to reinvent himself. He traded the working-class streets of his childhood for the sleek design studios of Milan, where he’s built a successful career and a new life—one carefully distanced from the neighborhood he came from.

But when he returns home for a family celebration, Gabriele is pulled back into a world that feels both comforting and claustrophobic: the slow rhythms of Rome, his loving but provincial family, and childhood friends whose lives have remained circumscribed by the same few blocks. Torn between nostalgia and shame, Gabriele is forced to reckon with everything he tried to leave behind.

And when a rumor about the true source of his success begins to circulate, the careful identity he’s constructed in Milan begins to crumble. In the space between who he was and who he’s become, Gabriele must confront the of where he truly belongs.

Written with grace, empathy, and psychological precision, The Burning Origin is a powerful story about social mobility, self-invention, and the double-edged freedom of those who leave.