New from Walker/Canongate: an acutely observed story of adolescence, featuring one of the most likeable but challenging young adults in contemporary fiction. Lou Connor, a gifted, unhappy sixteen-year-old, is desperate to escape her life of poverty in Sydney. When she is offered an exchange student placement at a school in America it seems as if her dreams will be fulfilled. Her host family has a beautiful house and couldn’t be more welcoming … until she starts to be suffocated by the repressed atmosphere of their suburban mansion and things start to go badly wrong. In Lou Connor, Hyland creates a larger-than-life protagonist who mesmerises the reader with her vivacity and vulnerability, from hopeful beginning to unexpected, haunting end.