Marlena

Tell me what you can't forget,and I'll tell you who you are . . . Cat is fifteen and the lonely new girl in town. Until she meets her neighbour, the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena. Cat is quickly lured into Marlena's roller-coaster orbit by little more than an arched eyebrow and a shake of white-blonde hair. Within one intense, obsessive year of friendship, Marlena is dead, drowned in six inches of icy water in the woods nearby. Decades later, when a ghost from that pivotal year surfaces unexpectedly, Cat must try again to move on, even as the memory of Marlena calls her back. Marlena is a riveting, intelligent and brilliant novel from debut author Julie Buntin. 'If you loved The Girls, this is for you . . . totally addictive' Grazia

The gifted young writer Julie Buntin has written a novel of deep and exquisite intelligence, humour and riveting sensitivity. A terrific debut, Julie Buntin captures that unique moment at the precipice of adulthood with emotional honesty and insight. She writes the kind of piercing, revelatory sentences you have to read to whomever is near, sentences you find yourself remembering years later, [A] vivid debut. . . .Buntin's prose is emotional and immediate, and the interior lives she draws of young women and obsessive best friends are Ferrante-esque, Sensitive and smart and arrestingly beautiful, makes coming-of-age stories feel both urgent and new. It could so easily be clichéd or sentimental. It is neither. Buntin creates a world so subtle and nuanced and alive that it imprints like a memory. Devastating; as unforgettable as it is gorgeous., One of this year's buzziest debuts

Julie Buntin is from northern Michigan. She attended NYU's MFA program in fiction, where she was an adjunct instructor and the recipient of a Starworks Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, O,The Oprah Magazine, Bustle, Slate, Electric Literature, and One Teen Story, among other publications. She teaches fiction writing at Marymount Manhattan College, and is the Director of Writing Programs at Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.