THE BEST NEW FICTION

The Girls

Emma Cline

Chatto & Windus €16.99

In the hot Californian summer of 1969, 14-year-old Evie becomes involved with a Charles Manson-like cult just before they go on their murderous spree. Privileged, bored and needy, Evie is in thrall less to the charismatic Manson figure, Russell, and their seemingly exotic lifestyle than to the sexual potency and allure of Suzanne, a femme fatale in hippie form. What truly distinguishes this remarkable debut novel is its lush, beautifully calibrated prose, which captures the drug-fuelled squalor of the chaotic ranch and the uncertainties of youth. Brilliant.

Simon Humphreys

Love & Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated

Whit Stillman

Two Roads €19.50

Writer-director Whit Stillman sets about redressing the calumnies heaped on Lady Susan by the ‘spinster authoress’ Jane Austen. Recently widowed, newly poor and sorely in need of a wealthy husband, Lady Susan mounts a two-pronged matrimonial campaign for herself and her long-suffering daughter in the heart of the DeCourcy household. Stillman has immense fun playing the earnest, gullible narrator’s misconceptions of her as a ‘shining ornament of Society and Nation’ against the machinations of an arch-manipulator in this witty, sly spoof. Eithne Farry

Devotion

Louisa Young

The Borough Press €19.50

Zigzagging between Mussolini’s Italy and an England still shell-shocked by the Great War, Devotion is a stirring story of war and its consequences delivered in workmanlike prose. The tempo is pedestrian at times but the relationship between Riley, a disfigured World War I veteran, and his adoptive son Tom, an idealist opposed to fascism, is tender and convincing. Welldrawn female characters complete an engaging saga.

Max Davidson