To hear that she has read my work, and that it has somehow touched her creative world, brings me the greatest joy and fills me with courage.” My favourite of hers is The Days of Abandonment – excruciating and perfect.” And Mieko Kawakami, the Japanese author of Breasts and Eggs, also selected by Ferrante, described her as “a writer who continually creates lives and worlds with strokes both delicate and grand. The Canadian author Sheila Heti said: “It means so much to me that she connected with my book, Motherhood. I am thrilled to be included in this wonderful initiative on behalf of independent bookshops.” Smith, whose 2000 debut White Teeth made the list, said: “Reading all of Ferrante slowly, in Italian, and then with obsessive speed, in English, have been two of the great reading experiences of my life. Several of the authors voiced their pleasure at being chosen by Ferrante. Natalia Ginzburg, author of Family Lexicon. It also includes several Italian bestsellers: Arturo’s Island by Elsa Morante, first published in 1957, about a boy coming-of-age on the Neapolitan island of Procida Accabadora by Michela Murgia, following a girl adopted by a secretive Sardinian woman Anna Maria Ortese’s short story collection Evening Descends Upon the Hills Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, a novel-cum-memoir first published in 1963 and translated to English in 2018 and Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s A Girl Returned, about an orphan who is returned to her birth mother and a life of poverty. The list include Pulitzer winners – Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies – and Booker winners such as Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.
All of the books are available in English, but span the world: Japan to Nigeria, India to Brazil.
Ferrante described her choices as being united by the theme of “stories of women with two feet, and sometimes one, in the 20th century”.
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