Irma van Dam Knihy

1978: Lower East Side, New York. Fifteen-year-old Finn Earl's mother, Liz, is a thirty-two year-old masseuse with a taste for cocaine. When Liz's habit forces them to flee the city, they find protection under the wing of one her clients, ageing billionaire Mr Osborne. In Vlyvalle, a golden playground for the super-rich, Finn discovers a people who are stranger, more savage, and more secretive than any tribe in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. Offered a new life and new friends amongst the decadent and beautiful denizens of Osborne's empire, Finn falls in love and grows up fast. He's living a twisted approximation of the American dream - and for a moment everything he wants is there for the taking. But in America, social-climbing is a blood sport. Even on what should be the happiest night of Finn's life, on an island in the middle of a private lake, naked and high with Maya, Osborne's bewitching granddaughter, someone is watching him from the depths of the forest… and laughing. A modern coming-of-age novel in the tradition of HUCKLEBERRY FINN, and a portrait of America as vivid and strange as THE GREAT GATSBY, FIERCE PEOPLE marks the emergence of a dazzling new talent.

As children, Roy and Alison Smith were so close their mother called them by one name: Alroy. But on a cool summer morning when she was fifteen, Alison woke to learn that Roy, three years older, was dead. While her Catholic parents wrestled with their faith and their grief, Alison made the mourners coffee, went to school to be taught by the nuns, and - being all her parents had left - set about coping. But underneath run her private rituals of mourning, her increasing idiosyncrasies, unnoticed by her parents trying to heal themselves and teachers anxious to be kind. Until suddenly, Alison begins to realize something's wrong. This is a book about grief, but it's also a love story, about Alison's love of her brother, of her childhood, and finally of life.