Sharp wit and compassion combine in a novel about girls and the women who shape them; about influence, identity, individual freedom and group responsibility.

In a small town in New Zealand, lifelong friends, Rachel, Julia and Chicky, are celebrating the end of school, enjoying the liminal space of the summer holidays before their lives will be transformed by university, careers and adulthood.

The arrival of Miranda, an exotically beautiful and charismatic woman, will have a profound effect on the ostensibly concrete bond between the girls, revealing long-ignored cracks in their friendships.

In The New Girl, Emily Perkins employs her sharp wit and incisive eye to demonstrate the profoundly destructive effects of resentment, mistrust and lies.

"Perkins has a wonderfully light touch; she is a master of dialogue and plain speech, a casual Carver for our times" - Observer

"Perkins’s restrained, uninflected prose is ideally suited to this quietly powerful tale of growing up… the strength of the characters still there, marooned by their own fears and haunted memories, ensures that their possible fates remain in our imagination long after the last page is turned" - Guardian

"A rites-of-passage tale from a pen as sharp and precise as a scalpel" - Wendy Holden