The name is fictitious, a pseudonym. In an age of self-promotion, Elena Ferrante keeps her real identity a closely-guarded secret.

In 2016, Time magazine included Ferrante among the 100 most influential persons in the contemporary world.

There have been many attempts by various writers to try and identify her real name; many have been mentioned but the name remains a close secret.

Originally written in Italian, her books have been translated into most contemporary languages. Her four-volume Neapolitan novels are her most widely known books.

The novels tell the story of two young (born in 1944) friends, highly articulate and courageous, who in different ways, carve out a life for themselves in a violent and stultifying culture.

The books are My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013); Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014) and The Story of the Lost Child (2015).

Two of the books have been made into films and the book being reviewed, The Lying Life of Adults is being made into a Netflix movie.

The fourth book of the Neapolitan quartet, The Story of the Lost Child, appeared in The New York Times list of the best books of 2015.

The Lying Life of Adults is the brutal account of self-hating Giovanna, born in Naples in 1979 and almost 13 when the story begins. It ends when Giovanna is only 16.

She is the cosseted only child of teachers and the three of them live in an apartment high on a hill in a middle-class area.

She has grown up with no extended family. Her mother's parents are dead and "my father lived in utter autonomy, as though he had no blood relatives, as if he was self-generated". Their social life revolves around another couple who live nearby, who have teenage daughters her age.

But every certainty and boundary the child has grown up with is about to be blasted away.

The opening sentence of the book gives away what is going to happen. "Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly."

This is no fairy tale of coming of age. Although the idea that her father called her "ugly" remains in Giovanna's mind for ever, that is not what he actually said. The exact words he used were "she's getting the face of Vittoria".

This is how we get introduced to Giovanna's paternal aunt, a hitherto unseen woman who still lives in the poor, low-lying district where Giovanna's father was raised and who has become in Giovanna's mind a "bogeyman, a lean, demonically silhouette, an unkempt figure lurking in the corners of houses when darkness falls".

Her father's comment unwittingly makes Giovanna want to meet Vittoria, and when she does, that becomes a life-changing event. Vittoria is completely transgressive, a completely unsuitable aunt.

She comes into the girl's life at a very critical moment, when Giovanna, like all adolescents, needs to break with her parents and discover who she is, on her own terms.

The proximity of this threatening and enveloping woman captivates her.

Vittoria speaks in dialect, constantly badmouths Giovanna's parents, drives "an ugly car, stinking of smoke" and shouts obscenities at other drivers "that I had never heard uttered by a woman".

Her aunt takes her to see the tomb of Enzo, a married man with whom she had been passionately if disastrously in love. This affair triggered the final rift between Vittoria and her brother. "She wept in front of the tomb, spoke to the marble, addressed bones she did not even see, a man who no longer existed."

Vittoria also talks to Giovanna as an equal, introduces the idea of passionate sex as "everything" in life and calls her niece "an intelligent little slut like me, but also a bitch".

As the book comes to an end (too soon for many of the author's many readers, unless there is a sequel) and Giovanna becomes an independent woman, she is still overshadowed by her father's words. "Andrea (her father), speaking rashly, had stripped me of my confidence."

She remains haunted by the fear that she is a terrible person and that Vittoria's face "will lay itself on my bones and never go away".

As in the other Ferrante novels, the sights and sounds of Naples, the emotions and the violence, are mediated through Ferrante's formal and austere prose.