Beth is sheltered, demure, and unassuming with a brilliant future just out of reach. Edie is wild, stylish, loud, and insatiable with the privileges of beauty, wealth and connections; her own brilliant future laid out since birth. These two are thrown together at a summer journalism internship and a friendship is born. I couldn't help but be drawn into their inevitable emotional tornado, set amidst the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic in 1980s New York City.
From bestselling, award-winning author Meg Rosoff comes a gritty, intoxicating novel about a summer of unforgettable firsts: of independence, lies, love and the inevitable loss of innocence. Sharp and irresistible, it's perfect for fans of Judy Blume's Summer Sisters and Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend.
New York City. Summer 1983. A summer internship in New York was meant to be everything Beth wanted. But from the moment she arrives in the city she feels wrong: wrong hair, terrible clothes, defective smile, too obviously a virgin. Sharing a hot, cockroach-filled apartment with a couple falling out of love completes the dream picture. Then she meets her fellow interns: ambitious out-of-towner Dan, preppy rich boy Oliver, and Edie — a beautiful, brittle, magnetic, instant best friend. Irresistible people are like gravity. You can’t help being pulled towards them — can you?
About the Author
MEG ROSOFF grew up in a suburb of Boston and moved to London in 1989. She spent fifteen years working in advertising before writing her first YA novel, How I Live Now, which has sold more than a million copies in thirty-six territories. It won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Michael L. Printz Award in the US and was made into a feature film. Her subsequent nine novels have been awarded or shortlisted for, among others, the Carnegie Medal and the National Book Award. She lives in London with her husband, the painter Paul Hamlyn.
Praise For…
"Rosoff evokes an unbearably hot summer in Manhattan with sidewalk-melting intensity, not skimping on gritty period detail, conveyed in a tabloid tone from the very first page. . . . Readers who remember the 1980s will enjoy this edgy tale of lost innocence as much as new adults." —Kirkus Reviews
"Through [Beth and Edie's] intense and complicated relationship, Rosoff depicts a rousing tale that centers an ambitious yet insecure teenager learning to take control of her life and desires." —Publishers Weekly
