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Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club for January 2015.

Happy 2015, everyone.

Today in the month of Janice, we'll be discussing a book organized around dyads,

most obviously the one between two girls growing up in a poor Italian neighborhood in the 1940s and 50s.

Yes, we are taking on my brilliant friend, the first book in what we thought was a

trilogy, but may not actually be merely a trilogy, called the Neapolitan novels by the mysterious

Elena Ferranti. I'm Katie Waldman, Slate's words correspondent, and I am so happy to be joined today

by two illustrious critics. They are both stationed in our New York studio, and they are New York Times

book review editor, Perrule Segal. Hey, Perl. Hey, Katie. And Slate Senior Editor David Hagland.

Hey, David. Hi, Katie. As always, spoilers are ahead. So if you care about that stuff,

you should press pause right now and go read My Brilliant Friend

before continuing on with us. Okay, my brilliant friend is so many things. It's about the

incredibly complicated relationship between two young working class girls, the narrator Elena,

and her friend Lila. It examines education, aspiration, money, language, bodies, love, sex. It is steeped in Italy's

recent political history. It could be feminist, but it also inhabits a place that feels

...