The Last Hope Of Girls

'Her present accommodation situation, she had resolved that morning, was unendurable, not even for another night, and in a frenzy of hope and shaky adrenaline she had handed in her notice and two weeks' rent, citing Raven Court as her new address.'

Newly installed live-in caretaker of four half-derelict Oxford Street flats, Martha Brazil can scarcely believe her luck. After years of stuffy bedsits and seedy suburban flatshares, the future seems electric with the promise of renovating and repair.

Cruising her local department store by day, and thrilling to the sounds of revelry that float through her window at night, it strikes her that surely an independent young person with flair and a surplus of willpower ought to be able to shine in such a setting.

But Martha's splendid isolation is overcast by shadows: of her high-handed writer father, whose seventeen novels she has studiously avoided; of her wild mother with her blind devotion to the dispossessed; and her adored brother, set on dancing his way to disaster.

When out of the blue her father's latest novel falls into her hands, it offers a view of her world and her wayward family that she can only ignore at her peril.

With characteristic insight, Susie Boyt has portrayed a complex, dynamic young woman adrift amid the bright lights of London. 'The Last Hope Of Girls' is a delightful tale of the triumph of wit and imagination over the most makeshift circumstances.