In a poor, violent neighbourhood on the edge of Naples in the 1950s, two clever girls, the studious Elena Greco and the fierce, brilliant Lila Cerullo, become friends and rivals. Across four books and some sixty years Elena, who narrates, studies her way out to university and a writing career while Lila stays behind, and the bond that defines them outlasts marriages, affairs, politics and the crime bosses who run the neighbourhood.