The Burning Girl – A Novel - Hardcover

[An] intense coming-of-age novel. . . . Messud captures the complicated nature of contemporary adolescence through a nuanced portrait of childhood love and loyalty deteriorating under the pressure of approaching adulthood.--Jane Ciabattari

Ms. Messud is at her most incisive in exploring the volatile transition from childhood to adolescence.--Sam Sacks

[A] masterwork of psychological fiction...Messud teases readers with a psychological mystery, withholding information and then cannily parceling it out.--Julia Klein

The friendship of two girls, Julia and Cassie, animates this slim, dreamlike novel...Messud plays, lightly, with familiar archetypes, deftly abstracting her take so that it flares into myth.

Messud is psychologically astute about her characters and about the competing social and familial pressures...that make adolescent friendship and its dissolution so fraught.

[Messud] has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives...Long before the recent success of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan tetralogy, which tells of the complex, often vexed, lifelong friendship between two women, Messud was narrating these stories with an unusual intensity--and quietly making a case for women's interiority as a subject worthy of the most serious examination.--Ruth Franklin

Messud is committed to the deep emotional excavation of her characters, revealing and exploring the complex inner impulses that fuel their stories...the author's prose and insights are breathtaking...With this novel, Messud brings her own particular brand of astuteness and emotional intelligence through her careful and thoughtful prose.

A bracing and hypnotic portrait of the complexities of female friendship from the New York Times bestselling author of The Woman Upstairs.