How The Light Gets In

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.