The best novels of 2015

A truly vintage year for fiction with a strong Booker shortlist, dazzling debuts and a real masterpiece from an old hand

by Alex Preston

This year, though (like last year), was all about the bewitching enigma of Elena Ferrante. The Story of the Lost Child (Europa Editions), the final installation of her Neapolitan quartet, was every bit as sinister and compelling as its predecessors, a vivid and haunting portrait of female friendship that confirms Ferrante as one of the masters of her craft.

Take your pick of the year’s finest books

The best books of 2015

“The Story of the Lost Child,’’ Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa)

This volume marks the culmination of the reclusive writer’s Neapolitan books, a meganovel about the lives of two women friends, family, and the way education makes it hard to ever go home again.

Top 10 Fiction Books

1. The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante

At the beginning of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Lila Cerullo and Elena Greco are two little girls playing with dolls on the streets of their rough Naples neighborhood. By the final installment, against all odds, Elena is a respected novelist and Lila a tech entrepreneur. Their lives play out against a backdrop of political tumult, mob violence, the women’s movement and countless other upheavals of the late 20th century. But Ferrante’s novels, culminating in this year’s wrenching Story of the Lost Child, stick brilliantly to their focus: the bond between two complex women whose ambition and charisma at times unite them, and at times bitterly divide them.

‘The New York Times’ Best Books Of 2015: Our Interviews With Authors

By Alison Brody

The New York Times just came out with its list of the 10 best books of 2015. They were some of our favorites, too. Over the last year, Diane sat down and talked to several of the selected authors. Check out the interviews here:

• For our latest Readers’ Review, Diane and her guests discussed “My Brilliant Friend,” the first book in the series of novels by Elena Ferrante that wrapped up this year with “The Story of the Lost Child.”

Shelf life

The best books this year are about North Korea, Detroit, Nagasaki and being a pilot

The Story of the Lost Child. By Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein. Europa; 464 pages; $18 and £11.99

This four-volume narrative, with all its operatic overtones, is a tribute to feminism and female friendship in mid-20th-century Naples. Written by a pseudonymous author whose real identity remains unknown and translated by an editor at the New Yorker, it is a wild and unlikely hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

Laura Miller’s 10 Favorite Books of 2015

In literary circles, readers seemed equally enamored of the bleak and unrelenting ordeal suffered by the central character inHanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and the classic narrative gambits of the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante, who published the final volume in her page-turning Neapolitan series, The Story of the Lost Child, this fall.

The 10 Best Books of 2015

Like the three books that precede it in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, this brilliant conclusion offers a clamorous, headlong exploration of female friendship set against a backdrop of poverty, ambition, violence and political struggle. As Elena and Lila, the girlhood rivals whose relationship spans the series, enter the middle terrain of marriage and motherhood, Ferrante’s preoccupations remain with the inherent radicalism of modern female identity — especially, and strikingly, with the struggles of the female artist against her biological and social destiny.

The best fiction of 2015

There were rich pickings from a host of top names including Kate Atkinson, Jonathan Franzen and Margaret Atwood. Plus we said goodbye to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld and revisted Harper Lee’s Scout Finch

Some mighty literary projects reached their conclusion in 2015. The Story of the Lost Child (Europa) is the fourth and final volume in Elena Ferrante’s series of Neapolitan novels, which explore female friendship and creativity against the tumultuous backdrop of Italian political violence and changing social mores. The books are startling, all-consuming, dense with plot and psychology – buy the set and begin with Elena and Lila’s childhood in My Brilliant Friend; it’ll be a long time before you come up for air.

The 24 Best Fiction Books Of 2015

The capper to Elena Ferrante’s beloved Neopolitan quartet, The Story of the Lost Child brings to a close the story of Lila and Elena, two young women growing up together in 1950s Naples. As they climb the social ladder and cope with changing fortunes, they find both refuge and tumult in their complex friendship. The Story of the Lost Child is a satisfying and devastating culmination to a series that has grabbed readers’ hearts.

100 Notable Books of 2015

The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.

THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD. Book 4, The Neapolitan Novels: “Maturity, Old Age.” By Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein. (Europa Editions, paper, $18.) Friends confront age and the questions of life’s meaning in the stunning final book of this brilliant series.

The best translated fiction of 2015

Boyd Tonkin

@indyvoices

At the root of literary art lies Socrates’ challenge to his accusers: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Some 2,400 years later, lives examined with a searing creative candour drive two series of mesmeric confessional fictions that have hooked readers everywhere. The Italian spellbinder Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet reached its climax in The Story of the Lost Child(translated by Ann Goldstein; Europa Editions, £11.99). (…)

The 50 Best Independent Press Books of 2015

This was the year, as Wesley Morris pointed out in the New York Times, of “a great cultural identity migration” — it was a year we wrestled with identity. This fact is everywhere evident in our independent literature — take, for example, John Keene’s exploration of race and historical identity inCounternarratives, the year’s best work of short fiction, independent or otherwise. Or Maggie Nelson’s much celebrated The Argonauts, which wrestles with family, queerness, and gender-fluidity by way of a courageous act of autotheory. It’s worth pointing out, too, that these examples, like many others on this list, rely on hybrid or altogether new forms of writing. Migrating identities, in other words, require migrating forms.

This is why I’ve chosen to include independent nonfiction on this year’s list. It’s also why I haven’t shied away from selecting from a wealth of translated fiction. National identity, or identities that build and dissolve within foreign borders, likewise migrate — sometimes into English. And they shouldn’t be ignored.

Here is your list of the 50 best books from independent presses that I knew of — or managed to remember — from 2015.

The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein (Europa)

A fitting conclusion to her landmark series of violent, Neapolitan novels, which may be the great literary cycle of our lifetimes.