We follow Leo across two summers in her family’s run-down Italian hotel as her life changes twice over: first, by witnessing the descent into alcoholism of her father, and second by falling in love for the first time, with a woman who works at the hotel for a summer. This novel is shocking beautiful but never obtrusively so, easing you into the two summers, slowly dragging you into the current of Leo’s world. You feel her relationships, how they shift and change around her as she does, observing her teenage spirals, always sympathising while also despairing at her choices and the ways she feels trapped. This stunning novel completely absorbed me, as I believe it will for all those that read it.

A sun-soaked sapphic romance set over the course of two sweltering Italian summers. Leo has spent her childhood summers at her family’s hotel, cleaning rooms after checkouts and collecting treasures left behind by guests. Whilst her mother is unwell, spending many days at a time in bed, she looks up to her often distant and confusing father, revelling in his attentions and hanging on his every word as he lavishes her with epic tales of Greek heroes. Fast forward nearly a decade, Leo is still tending to the hotel rooms, whilst her beloved Nonna becomes older and more frail, and the hotel shows its own signs of age. Enter: Dolores, an American girl with a shaved head who has come to set Leo alight, in more ways than one. This book oozes summer and sticky heat and sweat - it moves at a languid, almost sleepy pace, allowing us time and space to fall in love with Leo, Dolores and sun-drenched Italian summers. Montrone perfectly captures the awkward parts of girlhood; growing up and noticing changes happening in every part of you. Thank you, Canongate, for the early copy of this gorgeous debut.

A beautifully written vignette of two Italian summers, ‘Nymph’ considers two very different chapters in Leo’s life, which are more closely interwoven with one another than they may seem. The exploration of Leo’s relationship with her family in the first summer is moving, nuanced, and touches on the way memories can shape people in different ways; the latter summer comes charged with nostalgia, the emotions of first love, and a contemplation on the future that may lie ahead.