Cuckoo Press. London. 2015. Bound in collaboration with Black Fox Bindery. Limited edition, signed by the author as Elena Ferrante to the limitation page (there were also 26 leather bound copies issued simultaneously, lettered A-Z). This no. #34 of 100 signed and numbered copies.

The first volume in the globally-bestselling quartet known as The Neapolitan Novels, “My Brilliant Friend” begins with the complex and poetic account of the lives of two vibrant young women, Lila and Lenu. What starts as one woman’s attempted memoir of her friendship blossoms and expands into an examination of childhood friendship, love, loss, ambition and the intense and often traumatic complexities of navigating life as a woman.

Critically acclaimed, beautiful, violent, and mysterious by turns, the novel and its author have both been the source of controversy, not least because of Elena Ferrante’s insistence upon keeping her true identity a guarded secret. The author’s belief that, once written, stories no longer need their authors, coupled with her refusal to be concretely identified and insistence that she be able to write upon her own terms has aroused the ire and spite of a number of critics and journalists in her native Italy. Her decision to remain anonymous has even brought sexist arguments from male critics, that the secrecy surrounding her authorship is due to the fact that she must, in fact, be a man (a woman couldn’t possibly pen novels such as these).

The hunt for her “real” identity has several times breached the boundaries of decency and privacy, and continues to prove the point that there is nothing the literary world dislikes more than a woman who both excels in her art, and refuses to conform to what others belief an artist should be. This signed limited edition was produced by the small press publishing arm of the distinguished London firm John Sandoe Books (with some of their promotional material laid in at the front) and bound by a woman-owned book bindery. They remain completely close-mouthed as to how they persuaded the intensely private Ferrante to sign these 126 copies, but they are nevertheless the only books that Ferrante has officially signed. Deliberately, transcendently, rare and elusive.

8vo., publisher’s dark blue silk moire, spine titled in gilt, over geometrically decorated blue Chiyogami paper covered boards in gilt red and light blue, with an onlaid paper title label to front board, in a tailor made blue cloth slipcase; red endpapers; pp. [xiv], xiii-xv, [iv], 4-315, [vii]; with title page in red and black, and limitation notes behind mounted tissue; a fine copy of a beautifully-produced volume, internally clean, with a couple of small red marks to the foot of the slipcase.