Amy & Lan

Sadie Jones, whose earlier novel The Uninvited Guests was a bestseller, turns to childhood in this coming-of-age novel. Its narrators are Amy and Lan, and the book follows their move from innocence toward something more unsettling, shaped by their families' effort to build a rural idyll on a farm in the English countryside.

The novel opens with two competing childhood memories, one of a song and a silver necklace and another of a wolfhound knocking a little girl into a puddle. Amy Connell and Lan Honey grow up on a 78-acre farm in the South West of England, alongside siblings, other children, chickens, goats, three dogs and a calf named Gabriella Christmas. Their three families, old city friends, arrived at Frith and are slowly learning to work the land, year after year.

Left largely to themselves, the girls swing axes and clamber over haystacks. The real risks at Frith, however, are the ones the adults cannot see, and they lie with Lan's mother, Gail, and Amy's father, Adam, who ought to be more careful than the children they are responsible for.