The Girls by Emma Cline

Emma Cline's much-anticipated debut shows its hand immediately: 'They herd everyone into the living room. The moment the frightened people understand the sweet dailiness of their lives is already gone.' But there is no mystery to track in The Girls and little to spoil. 14-year-old Evie Boyd's clear-sighted narration, her chilling account of the California summer of 1969, eventually reveals the grotesque details of its pivotal act of violence. Cline's real achievement is not so much the dread-filled journey to the book's harrowing climax, however, but her vividly drawn central character and how she stumbles from invisible, impressionable bystander to unwitting accomplice.

Evie is an atypically ordinary American teenager, forgotten by her parents, misunderstood by her friends and eager to infiltrate the drifting band of the title. This tight group ('sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water') are led by the fearless Suzanne and in thrall to their talismanic leader Russell. Their squalid existence at a remote woodland camp is Branch Davidian with a film of gothic grime. Cline is excellent at capturing the complex negotiations and compromises of girlhood and the unfathomable damage caused by weak men when they select their prey with ruthless precision. The Girls is a horror story for our times, a gripping and richly poetic account of young lives needlessly abused and snuffed out. Its ambition and its reach are immense.