Penance

Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts, is named by Granta among its Best Young British Novelists of 2023. Her novel Penance opens on a beach in a rundown seaside town on the Yorkshire coast, where three schoolgirls set sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson on fire.

Nearly ten years later, journalist Alec Z. Carelli sets out to write the full account of the killing. His research combines long interviews with witnesses and relatives, close study of the past, and letters exchanged with the killers themselves.

The result follows lives shattered by the tragedy and a town thrown into upheaval. The book also asks how much of what Carelli reports can be trusted.

Penance explores gender, class, and power, and examines the media's role in shaping stories and our appetite for true crime. It looks closely at cruelty and the darker impulses in human nature. Its portrait of young women is as sharp as that found in Emma Cline's The Girls.