At the root of literary art lies Socrates' challenge to his accusers: "The unexamined life is not worth living." Some 2,400 years later, lives examined with a searing creative candour drive two series of mesmeric confessional fictions that have hooked readers everywhere. The Italian spellbinder Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet reached its climax in The Story of the Lost Child (translated by Ann Goldstein; Europa Editions, £11.99). At the far end of the same continent, Karl Ove Knausgaard excavated his young manhood in northern Norway in the fourth part of My Struggle: Dancing in the Dark (trans. Don Bartlett; Vintage, £8.99).
