Local Girls, by Alice Hoffman, (Vintage, £6.99)
TOLD from the sly and knowing perspective of Gretel Samuelson, Local Girls charts her progress from a child to the cusp of womanhood.
She picks her way through the tragedies and absurdities of everyday life in a family rocked by divorce and disaster, bad judgment and fierce attachments.
Her father has left them, her chain-smoking mother Franny is falling apart and refuses the simple lessons in life, her perfect brother Jason has flaws and even her best friend Jill - blonde and beautiful - is moving too fast into the world of women.
In the middle of a hot, unforgiving summer, Gretel is cynical and depressed at her father's remarriage, her mother's battle against cancer and her grandmother's death.
She falls in love with the notorious drug dealer Sonny Garnet and, although hopelessly besotted, leaves him when she realises what life with him would mean.
Now Gretel no longer believes in anything as her brother's inexorable downward spiral culminates in a fireball car crash and heroin overdose and her mother succumbs to cancer.
Yet she survives her family anguish and resolves to leave it all behind, moving through university and into adulthood in this touching tale of a young woman trying to make sense of the world, its drudgery and broken dreams.
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