This ethereal debut has been compared to Lolita and On the Road. Certainly, the beautiful teenage narrator, zig-zagging the vast interior of the US with an enigmatic, much-older companion, seems a fantasy Lolita. She is eager for experience and hungry for love, the puppy dog seducer in her undefined relationship with reluctant ‘reformed hedonist’ Gunther. ‘Guys just can’t resist the advances of us young chicks, I’m told,’ she observes hopefully.

This is a story about loss of innocence, ambiguously portrayed. There’s an Alice in Wonderland quality to the narrator’s journey through a sinister small-town America populated by oddly menacing average Americans and a string of likeable eccentrics (Gunther’s friends). The fine line she treads between the childhood she is exiting and the newly strange adult world gifts her with a curious perspective: an Alice-like blend of naivety and knowingness. ‘When I’m older, if I’m anything like the rest of them, I’ll have lost the ability to understand anything.’

The narrator both loses and gains from her accumulated experience, becoming more wary and knowing as a result of her many mishaps, but accruing friendship and a growing hoard of knowledge, too. Atmospheric and intriguing.