New from Walker/Canongate: an acutely observed story of adolescence, featuring one of the most likeable but challenging young adults in contemporary fiction. Lou Connor, a gifted, unhappy sixteen-year-old, is desperate to escape her life of poverty in Sydney. When she is offered an exchange student placement at a school in America it seems as if her dreams will be fulfilled. Her host family has a beautiful house and couldn't be more welcoming ... until she starts to be suffocated by the repressed atmosphere of their suburban mansion and things start to go badly wrong. In Lou Connor, Hyland creates a larger-than-life protagonist who mesmerises the reader with her vivacity and vulnerability, from hopeful beginning to unexpected, haunting end.

 

There are 336 pages in this book. This book was published 2011 by Walker Books Ltd .

MJ Hyland was born in London to Irish parents in 1968. Until August 2005, she lived and worked in Australia, but she now lives in the UK, and has recently published her third novel. Her second novel, Carry Me Down, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and won the Hawthornden Prize and the Encore prize. She has also been appointed to the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester as a Lecturer in Creative Writing. Her work has been acclaimed by the likes of Ali Smith, Hilary Mantel and JM Coetzee, who commented, "This is fiction writing of the highest order. "