All Girls

By: Emily Layden

Narrated by: Ali Ahn, Caitlin Davies, Carlotta Brentan, Cheryl Smith, Chloe Cannon, Dylan Moore, Emily Shaffer, Imani Jade Powers, Jesse Vilinsky, Kristen DiMercurio, Natalie Naudus

Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

A keenly perceptive coming-of-age novel set at a prestigious New England prep school, as nine young women navigate their ambitions, friendships and fears against the backdrop of a scandal the administration wants silenced.

An all-girls boarding school in a hilly corner of Connecticut, Atwater is a haven for progressive thinking and feminist intellectuals. The students are smart, driven and worldly; they are also teenagers, learning to find their way. But when they arrive on campus for the start of the fall term, they're confronted with startling news: an Atwater alumna has made a troubling allegation of sexual misconduct against an unidentified teacher. As the weeks wear on and the administration's efforts to manage the ensuing crisis fall short, these extraordinary young women come to realise that the adults in their lives may not be the protectors they previously believed.

All Girls unfolds over the course of one tumultuous academic year and is told from the point of view of a small cast of diverse, interconnected characters as they navigate the social mores of prep school life and the broader, more universal challenges of growing up. The trials of adolescent girlhood are pitched against the backdrop of sexual assault, consent, anxiety and the ways that our culture looks to young women as trendsetters, but otherwise silences their voices and discounts their opinions. The story that emerges is a richly detailed, impeccably layered, and emotionally nuanced depiction of what it means to come of age in a female body today.

©2021 Emily Layden (P)2021 Hodder & Stoughton Limited