Far from Naples

It’s a brave dramatist who would seek to adapt for radio the hit novels of the Italian writer Elena Ferrante. As soon as her quartet of novels set in Naples from the 1950s onwards began appearing in English translation a few years ago they created a bestselling stir because of the unusually bold flavour of the writing and the brutal honesty with which Ferrante is prepared to expose the dark underside of female friendship and motherhood, its jealousies and bitterness, the betrayals and self-centredness. It was even rumoured that Ferrante must be a man (she has never given an interview) because no woman, surely, would be so critical of her own sex (which doesn’t explain why she is not kind to men either).

But the acclaimed adapter Timberlake Wertenbaker has taken up the challenge and her two-part dramatisation of the first book in the sequence, My Brilliant Friend, is the Sunday-afternoon classic this week and next (as part of Radio 4’s Reading Europe season).