Girl A: A Novel

"Finally, Abigail Dean’s Girl A is the psychological thriller everyone seems to be talking about this season. The focus of enormous pre-publication hype, the novel has been backed by Paula Hawkins ( The Girl on the Train ), Jessie Burton ( The Miniaturist ) and what seems like dozens of other big-name authors, and is set to be a television show directed by Johan Renck (HBO’s Chernobyl). In it, a woman is forced to reckon with the extreme abuse she and her siblings underwent as children at the hands of their parents and the impact it had on their later lives. An assured debut that you will find hard to put down – but be prepared for a harrowing read. It’s out on the 21 January in the UK, and 2 February stateside. The American writer Patricia Lockwood is best known as a poet and memoirist (you really must read her hilarious account of growing up the daughter of a charismatic but erratic Lutheran minister, Priestdaddy ), but she will release a debut novel No One is Talking About This on February 16. It’s garnered praise from Sally Rooney ( Normal People ) and Jia Tolentino ( Trick Mirror ) and follows a woman who has found enormous fame off the back of her humorous social media posts. (One might suspect there to be an autofictional strand at play here, given that Lockwood is almost as well known for her irreverent Twitter presence as she is for her perceptive literary criticism .)"