Chances are you’ve read or heard of Elena Ferrante’s popular Neapolitan Novels, or at least caught glimpses of the books’ notably generic “chick lit”–style covers on the subway and on friends’ coffee tables. It’s true that the covers are not very enticing, but you know what they say about books and covers.

The Ferrante novels have taken the literary world by storm since My Brilliant Friend was published in 2011.The novel and its three successors follow the story of two friends, Lila and the narrator Elena, who were born in a poor neighborhood in Naples in the 1950s.