Originally self-published, this ‘coming of age’ novel has been picked up by mainstream publishers and promises to become a cult classic.

Narrator Eveline Auerbach is in her final year of high school in East Hampton, New York in 1979. Eveline is an artist, a thinker and a non-conformist, and one of the successes of this 600-page book is the complex and insightful way Eveline views the events and people around her.

The novel opens with the death of Eveline’s best friend’s mother. When her best friend Kate comes to live with Eveline and her mother, Eveline must deal with the changing dynamic of their friendship, as well as her own grief for a woman who was more a mother to her than her own.

As the novel moves into the early 1980s, Eveline’s experiences of romantic and sexual love are explored. Her detachment from the ‘in crowd’ and lack of conformity makes her desirable to men, and she must learn to separate her need from theirs, particularly when it comes to Jack, her troubled high school boyfriend. This is an extraordinary book, well-written, fluid and always gripping.