Following Girls

When Amanda Baker was 14 she found a letter written by her runaway mother to her unborn child: ‘Dear Jeremy’ it began ‘or Amanda...’. Now Baker is sixteen and sick of her lot as she moves miserably between lessons, her only solace her fifth form gang – the four Mandies – and a low-calorie diet of king-sized cigarettes. That is, until she teams up with Julia Smith, games captain and consummate game player. And so begins a passionate friendship that will threaten her future, menace her sanity and risk the betrayal of everything and everyone she holds dear.

Fizzes with cracking one-liners, acute observations and acidic social satire. It’s funny, boisterous and sharp ... An acerbic and gloriously evocative portrait of Seventies girlhood … Pitch-perfect, Simultaneously funny – wryly and sometimes bleakly so – and painful to read. Levene perfectly captures the brutality of adolescence, An acutely observed and witty portrayal of the school exploits and growing pains of a 1970s teenager … Knowing and funny, this is St Trinian’s for grown-ups *****, A clever and extremely entertaining study of teenage claustrophobia, Reflective, bittersweet and frequently funny

Louise Levene is the author of A Vision of Loveliness, a BBC Book at Bedtime, which was also longlisted for the Desmond Elliott first novel prize, and Ghastly Business. She has been the dance critic of the Sunday Telegraph since 1998 but has also been an advertising copywriter, a window dresser, a radio presenter, an office cleaner, a crossword editor, a university tutor, a college professor and a saleslady. She lives in London with her husband and their two children.