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Fiction & Poetry, Modern & Contemporary Fiction

The Burning Girl

Claire Messud (author)

Hardback Published on: 07/09/2017

£16.99

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Synopsis

Julia Robinson and Cassie Burnes have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts.

As the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge: while Julia comes from a stable, happy, middle-class family, Cassie never knew her father, who died when she was an infant, and has an increasingly tempestuous relationship with her single mother, Bev.

When Bev becomes involved with the mysterious Anders Shute, Cassie feels cruelly abandoned. Disturbed, angry and desperate for answers, she sets out on a journey that will put her own life in danger, and shatter her oldest friendship.

Compact, compelling, and ferociously sad, *The Burning Girl* is at once a story about childhood, friendship and community, and a complex examination of the stories we tell ourselves about childhood and friendship. Claire Messud brilliantly mixes folklore and Bildungsroman, exploring the ways in which our made-up stories, and their consequences, become real.

'Messud dissects and displays for us what it means to inhabit a female body in 21st-century America…Messud is magnificent on female fury… *The Burning Girl* is an astute, subtle novel that conceals an eloquent and clear-eyed rage simmering beneath its surface - rage against the limitations imposed on young women by society' - *The FT*