My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

This is my self-initiated brief to create a book cover for My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. I wanted to show the two main protagonists—Lenu and Lila—as the story revolves around their relationship. Their linked arms illustrate their closeness. I hid their faces to let the reader imagine them, with the girls running away from the viewer. Lila, the driving force of the pair, is in the lead dragging Lenu along. The book being dropped is a hint at the story plot. The girls had to be dressed in simple frocks. Being working class, their parents wouldn’t have had the money to provide them with dresses full of detailing, or anything that would use a lot of fabric. Set in the 1940’s in a deprived area of Naples, the buildings and overall look of the street needed to reflect this. Many images of Naples from that era show clothing lines hanging between buildings. It gave me the idea to have a drying sheet blowing in the wind in the foreground, onto which I could place the book’s title. The bra on a clothing line references the fact that, in the course of the book, the girls become teenagers. The door at the end of the alley is shut. What’s behind it, the girls’ future, is still unknown to them and full of possibilities. I drew the words by hand using a mix of typographic styles, taking inspiration from 1940's Italian film posters.