Pen Sheppard is listless in her mother’s country home, lost again in the world of her childhood – her mother’s bad boyfriends, a town full of fakery, gossip as currency, and reputations that never die. Pen hoped she was rid of her hometown when she went to university, living on campus and making a new life, yet here she is, recovering in the only place that would have her back. Just six months since she left and she’s in the town psychiatrist’s office, as she was before she left, but this time she has a different story to tell – if he can get her to tell it. And that’s if she can piece together, for herself, the six months of university life that started as a delirious, unnerving freedom and then turned into a semester of murky dangers, and on-campus claustrophobia that makes even a small town seem large.

Clifford’s debut novel is full of strengths: her sense of place and time is delivered with the utmost clarity, the late ’80s is rendered in a way that brings on waves of nostalgia without resorting to cheap tricks (or references to Cheap Trick). The emotional intensity of starting university is made even headier by undercurrents of threat on campus that start as a game, then turn into something much more vicious. It’s a haunting read, a psychological thriller with loose threads picked at and unravelled chapter by chapter, from past to present, from truth to fiction and back again. This is one for anyone who wonders what really happens down those cobblestone paths on university grounds, or to what lengths people will go to protect their secrets.

Fiona Hardy