The Burning Girl
'[Messud] is an absolute master storyteller' Los Angeles Times
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3 Months Free + £10 Audible voucher
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The Burning Girl
Narrated by:
Morgan Hallett
Buy Now for £14.35
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Narrated by:
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Morgan Hallett
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By:
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Claire Messud
A Vogue Top 10 Book of the Year and New York Times bestselling author, a bracing and hypnotic portrait of the complexities of female friendship
Julia Robinson and Cassie Burnes have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts. But as the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge: while Julia comes from a stable, happy, middle-class family, Cassie never knew her father, who died when she was an infant, and has an increasingly tempestuous relationship with her single mother, Bev. When Bev becomes involved with the mysterious Anders Shute, Cassie feels cruelly abandoned. Disturbed, angry and desperate for answers, she sets out on a journey that will put her own life in danger, and shatter her oldest friendship.
Compact, compelling, and ferociously sad, The Burning Girl is at once a story about childhood, friendship and community, and a complex examination of the stories we tell ourselves about childhood and friendship. Claire Messud brilliantly mixes folklore and Bildungsroman, exploring the ways in which our made-up stories, and their consequences, become real.©2017 Claire Messud
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Critic reviews
Messud is magnificent on female fury . . . The Burning Girl is an astute, subtle novel that conceals an eloquent and clear-eyed rage simmering beneath its surface (Francesca Segal)
Messud captures young adolescence vividly and unjudgementally . . . this is a hard book to stop reading (Ursula K Le Guin)
A novel of deep emotional intelligence . . . There are insightful, psychologically astute meditations throughout the narrative, written in the precise, elegant prose we've come to expect from this master storyteller . . . The Burning Girl is reminiscent of My Brilliant Friend (Lucy Scholes)
Emotionally intense and quietly haunting
The Woman Upstairs was a clever, audacious portrayal of an untrustworthy protagonist. Informed by the same sophisticated intelligence and elegant prose, but gaining new poignant depths, this novel is haunting and emotionally gripping
A novel that packs a massive punch as it delves into the devastating results of a fractured friendship
Messud's gift is to understand the nuances of female relationships and believe that they are worthy of sustained and unhurried attention
Two best friends from childhood are forced on to different paths in The Burning Girl. But Claire Messud's moving writing makes it so much deeper, and gets us to think about growing up, friendship and how girls are treated by society
This is a terrific novel, beautifully written and crafted; I don't believe Messud could write a duff sentence if she tried (Kate Saunders)
This fierce, melancholy book lays bare the girls' shared desire to escape their small-town American home for something bigger and brighter, and explores why it went badly awry
Lingeringly evocative, this is a heartfelt coming-of-age tale whose insights - into girlhood especially - are braided with mystery and menace
Claire Messud's elegant, understated new novel . . . Messud brilliantly renders the uncertainty of Julia's sense of identity . . . beautifully evocative
Gripping
This is a taut, sure-footed and sobering exploration of girlhood
An exceptionally well-written and emotionally powerful account of one such loss, in which the intense friendship between two prepubescent girls fails as they move from the clarity of childhood towards the uncertainties and dangers of adolescence . . . This novel serves as an examination of the power of the storyteller as much as a reworking of the classic themes of innocence betrayed and love lost . . . Exhilarating, because of Messud's sheer intelligence, the richness and beauty of her prose and her understanding of the art and value of storytelling. It is a haunting, stunning novel and deserves every prize (Anne Chisholm)
Messud's cut-glass prose reels you into a quietly shocking narrative that chillingly portrays female coming-of-age as a terrifying loss of freedom
Messud painstakingly follows the ebbs and flows of the minutiae of what it means to be and to have a friend when you are struggling to develop an adult identity (Linda Grant)
Every now and then there comes along a really outstanding novel that keeps you thinking and remembering long after it’s finished. This is it. Don’t miss it.
As children Julia and Cassie are sister-close childhood soul-buddies in America who escape their differently rather repressive homes into an inventive world of fantasy acted out in an eerie abandoned asylum still resonating with past pain and suffering. At the age of 12, that outlet is closed down and as the real world closes in, the bond between the two girls loosens and they drift apart.
As teenagers, Julia suffers the anguish of seeing her lost friend with the boy she had hoped to have for herself. The picture of adolescence and its agonies and complexities is brilliantly conveyed. The whole is Julia’s story, a great canvas more like a painting than a narrative, infinitely subtle. Cassie’s home life disintegrates when her mother imports a partner whose control over his new family becomes sinister and Cassie runs away in search of the father she was always told is dead but who she believes is the guardian angel she’s found through Google (this is the now-age of Instagram and internet searches).
The events which begin in childhood take Julia to the end of school after Cassie has gone from her life for good (to explain would be to spoil it). There are no neat endings, no happy resolutions, no clear lessons, no absolute blame; there are failures and grief, struggles and complexities… Time passes and Julia and Cassie come through – just like real life. This makes it sound depressing but it’s not. Pulsating with life, beautiful prose and sophisticated story-telling, it’s hugely exhilarating and hauntingly real.
Morgan Hallett’s reading is a great bonus to the listening – absolutely believable as Julia. But why is Cassie called Cathy all the way through??
An outstanding novel not to miss!
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