Books Like My Brilliant Friend: 10 Friendship Novels

Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is the first of the Neapolitan Novels, the acclaimed quartet that traces the lifelong friendship of Elena and Lila from childhood in a poor neighborhood of 1950s Naples. Fierce, intimate, and unsentimental, it captures the love, rivalry, envy, and devotion between two girls against a vivid backdrop of class, gender, and a changing Italy. Ferrante’s genius is to make the ordinary drama of growing up and growing apart feel as gripping and momentous as any epic.

The books below share its preoccupations — the intensity of friendship, the formation of a self, the bonds and tensions of young relationships, and the way the places and times we come from shape who we become. Some continue Elena and Lila’s story; others find the same fierce intimacy in their own characters.

Continue the Neapolitan Novels

#1 — The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

The essential next read. The second Neapolitan Novel follows Elena and Lila into young adulthood, marriage, and diverging paths, deepening the friendship’s love and rivalry. It picks up exactly where My Brilliant Friend leaves off and is indispensable for readers gripped by the saga.

#2 — Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

The third volume carries Elena and Lila into adulthood, motherhood, politics, and ambition, as the distance and pull between them grows ever more complex. For readers committed to Ferrante’s quartet, it continues one of the great friendships in modern fiction.

Intense, Intimate Young Relationships

#3 — Normal People by Sally Rooney

Rooney’s beloved novel traces the on-and-off relationship of two young people from school through university with the same fierce intimacy and psychological precision Ferrante brings to friendship. Spare and devastating, it is a natural next read for those drawn to the intensity of My Brilliant Friend.

#4 — Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Rooney’s debut follows a complex web of friendship, love, and rivalry among young people in Dublin. Its sharp, intimate attention to the shifting dynamics between its characters echoes Ferrante’s unflinching honesty about closeness and competition.

#5 — A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Yanagihara’s epic follows four friends across decades in New York, charting devotion, damage, and the way friendship sustains and fails us. Far darker than Ferrante, it shares the ambition to follow relationships across a lifetime and to take friendship as seriously as any love story.

Coming of Age and the Making of a Self

#6 — The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Tartt’s mesmerizing novel of a clique of classics students bound by a terrible secret shares My Brilliant Friend’s intensity about youthful friendship, class, and the formation of identity, wrapped in an atmospheric, propulsive story.

#7 — The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Tartt’s Pulitzer winner follows a boy across a sprawling coming-of-age shaped by loss, friendship, and obsession. Its immersive scale and its attention to how youthful bonds and traumas echo through a life make it a rich choice for Ferrante readers.

#8 — Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Smith’s novel traces a complicated friendship between two girls from childhood into adulthood, exploring race, class, ambition, and the ways friends shape and shadow each other. Its lifelong-friendship structure makes it a strong companion to the Neapolitan saga.

#9 — The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Bennett’s acclaimed novel follows twin sisters whose lives diverge dramatically, tracing identity, family, and the long consequences of the choices that separate them. Its multigenerational intimacy and its focus on how women’s lives are shaped by class and circumstance resonate with Ferrante’s themes.

#10 — A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

For readers who loved the social sweep behind the friendship — the way history and class press on individual lives — Mistry’s epic of four people thrown together in 1970s India offers the same fusion of intimate human bonds and a vivid, unsparing portrait of society.

So What Should You Read?

Which of these you reach for depends on what drew you most to Ferrante. If it was the lifelong arc of Elena and Lila’s friendship, the only real answer is to keep reading the Neapolitan Novels themselves — The Story of a New Name and the volumes that follow complete one of the great sagas of female friendship in modern fiction. If it was the fierce, intimate psychology of young relationships, Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Conversations with Friends offer the closest contemporary equivalent, spare and devastating in their attention to how people wound and need each other.

Readers drawn to the way Ferrante sets private bonds against the larger forces of class, history, and place will find that sweep in A Fine Balance and Swing Time, while those who loved the sheer immersive intensity of growing up alongside these characters should try The Secret History, The Goldfinch, and A Little Life. What unites them all is a refusal to treat friendship as secondary to romance — an insistence that the people who shape us most are often the friends we love, envy, and never quite escape. That is Ferrante’s great subject, and these novels honor it.

Two More to Add

Ferrante’s quartet is best experienced in full, so her Neapolitan Novels are the natural place to keep going after My Brilliant Friend. And for more fierce, intelligent fiction about young women, friendship, and the forces that shape them, Sally Rooney’s growing body of work offers exactly the intimate, unsparing voice that Ferrante readers love.

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