The Burning Girl

By: Claire Messud

Narrated by: Morgan Hallett

Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

BY THE AUTHOR OF THE 2024 BOOKER LONGLISTED THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY
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 (P)2017 Little Brown Book Group

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)

This is a terrific novel, beautifully written and crafted; I don't believe Messud could write a duff sentence if she tried (Kate Saunders)

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)