INSIDE Psychogeography, but not as we know it Frank Lloyd Wright’s tempestuous life Dodging bullets in Iraq and Bosnia

dilapidated lower town and the sea-view homes of the bourgeoisie above, but it more nearly resembles Ferrante’s earlier books, with their tight focus and tart explorations of individuals’ discontents.

The quartet had at its centre a comparatively bland heroine around whom a huge cast of more vivid characters gyrated, outstanding among them the fierce, dazzling, tragic Lila. Those books encompassed a whole world, its intricate web of politics and criminality, love affairs and vendettas. The Lying Life of Adults, by contrast, is all interior, centred on one girl’s development. Religion matters because of what it represents to Giovanna – something grand that belongs not to the polite world of her atheist parents, but to the mysterious vitality of her aunt’s working-class milieu. Power, whether shored up by force or by money, impinges on her via the boys she meets.

She is by turns entranced by a fantasy of witchcraft; by a puritanical nihilism that impels her to court degradation by means of blow-jobs and failed exams; by an infatuation with a handsome young couple whose troubled relationship has her vibrating with sympathetic eroticism. As she progresses towards adulthood these storylines fall away like the spent stages of a rocketlauncher. Aunt Vittoria slips from sight. Giovanna’s parents’ adulteries – for a while of obsessive interest to her – cease to matter. A minor character, a younger girl, emerges very late as her necessary companion. All this makes for a curiously pruned narrative, in which no branch quite achieves a shapely completeness, but it also feels modern, urgent, truthful.

Finally, a hurrah for

Ferrante’s translator Ann Goldstein. This is the first of Ferrante’s novels I have read in the original Italian (Goldstein’s English version will be published next June). Ferrante’s own voice feels exactly like the one I already know. The rhythms of her prose are just as Goldstein reproduces them. It’s not just that her narrative strategies are familiar – the thrilling shock when a storyline swings on a trivial detail; the tremendously suggestive lacunae. The intricate sentences full of subtle shifts of tone; the brusque, forceful dialogue – all are here. So, too, is the compelling storytelling. Ferrante’s fans may be surprised by this book – by its narrow focus and its stringent tone

– but they are likely to fall again under her spell.