The Lying Life of Adults is Ferrante’s first novel since the Neapolitan quartet ended in 2015 with The Story of the Lost Child. It is perhaps no accident that this new book is a tale of a young woman grappling with the suffocating weight of expectations. ‘We perform acts that seem like acts but in fact they’re symbols,’ Giovanna tells us. Can she free herself? Can the woman who wrote her?

Eavesdropping on her parents after a fraught parent–teacher conference, young Giovanna overhears the father she adores liken her to his estranged sister, Vittoria. It is the ultimate slur. ‘She was a childhood bogeyman,’ Giovanna explains, ‘a lean demonic silhouette.’ Vittoria is detested ‘the way you detest a lizard that runs up your bare leg’; less a person than a family shorthand for soul-deep ugliness. In family photos her face is blacked out, lest she defile innocent eyes.

Anguished by the comparison, Giovanna sees no alternative than to seek out Vittoria and see the she-devil for herself. And so she descends into the blue-collar fray of Naples (‘we lived in the highest part of Naples, and to go anywhere inevitably had to descend’), a class tourist clad in head-to-toe pink.

The woman she finds has a beauty so ferocious ‘that to consider her ugly became a necessity’. As her father warned, the minute Giovanna arrives, Vittoria launches into a tirade against him (‘he thinks he’s smart, but he’s never been smart: I am smart, he’s only clever’). But rather than straight-backed loyalty, Giovanna feels a fizz of pleasure in hearing tales of his failings. There are other pleasures, too. In dialect slang, Vittoria entertains her young niece with tales of adulterous fucking. ‘Oh to learn to speak like that,’ says the captivated Giovanna, ‘outside of every convention of my house.’ What exhilarating, guileless vulgarity.

When Giovanna leaves, Vittoria instructs her to pay attention. ‘She said I had blinders like a horse, I looked but didn’t see the things that could disturb me. Look, look, look, she hammered into me.’ The problem with looking is that you start to see things: the wrong pair of feet, for instance, entwined under the table at a dinner party, or the onanistic tedium of the ‘self-important babble of the cultivated’. You see hypocrisy and cruelty, desire and fear. You see lies. And then you learn how to tell them.

The Lying Life of Adults is a novel of adolescent unmaking – of how wrenching it can be to cut ourselves adrift. Parental disappointments, first infatuations, sexual experimentation, awkward bodies, social peacocking, and humiliation: this is standard coming-of-age fare. What Ferrante does is scrub the candy-floss stink of nostalgia off it. Ferrante’s heroines are raw and raw-toothed: they make Holden Caulfield’s ironic laddish grumblings seem twee. Ann Goldstein’s translations – emotionally literate but sharp-edged – are the perfect foil for Ferrante’s narrative brutality.

Giovanna’s ‘terrible Italy’ is the Naples of the mid-1990s, two generations along from the brilliant friends of the Neapolitan novels. Sexual mores may have shifted, but while Giovanna’s progressive parents teach her the slogans of second-wave feminism, she still exists in a miasma of gendered violence. ‘If I find out you’ve wasted it,’ Vittoria remarks to Giovanna of her virginity, ‘I’ll tell your father, and we’ll beat you to death.’ Riding shotgun with a friend of a friend, she is struck by how his desire for her is laced with hatred: ‘For a second I saw him as a very bright demon that would grab my head in both hands and first forcibly kiss me, then beat me against the window until I was dead.’ Is there any wonder that Giovanna finds herself despising her newly adult body and all its implications? ‘A very violent need for degradation was growing inside me,’ she confides, ‘a fearless degradation, a yearning to feel heroically vile.’ If ruin is inevitable, far better to be the architect of your own.

As in the Neapolitan novels, The Lying Life of Adults is a series of psychologically ornate set pieces – scenes alert to quiet shifts in faces, bodies, and power: sexual power, class power, intellectual power, discursive power. Readers familiar with that tremendous literary project will find Ferrante trademarks here: cloying friendships, garrulous Marxists, a feckless love interest with a big brain and an even bigger ego, and a talismanic object: a jewelled bracelet passed from wrist to wrist like some kind of emotional handcuff. But the loudest resonance is the slippery question of authorship – of what it means to tell the story of ourselves.

Reflecting on her disillusioning adolescence, adult Giovanna, now a writer, searches for a narrative thread to tether her past and future selves, but finds only a ‘tangled knot’ of memories. It will be up to us to unravel this ‘snarled confusion of suffering’, to trace out an arc and anoint a villain (or two). There is a mighty power here, but are we wielding it, or is she? The sly brilliance of The Lying Life of Adults is that we can never be sure if we’re being entrusted or manipulated. Ferrante’s ninth novel could easily have been called ‘The Lying Life of Writers’. So could most great books.