NYMPH

Nymph by Sofia Montrone revels in the exuberant highs and awkward lows of girlhood and captures the universal experiences of trying to hold on to what is elusive, to deny what cannot be faced, and to say what cannot be said.

Ten-year-old Leo spends her mornings tidying the rooms of her nonna's time-worn Italian hotel, quietly accumulating the junk and treasures left behind by guests - a pearl earring, a lock of hair. Her nights are suffused with her father's liquor-spun tales of his childhood, mingled with stories of Greek heroes of old. Years later, over another hot, endless Italian summer, the hotel is one of the only things in Leo's life that has remained constant.

An accident has knocked her family sideways; her brother Max is distant and Nonna has grown frail. But then she meets Dolores, an American girl who sets something alight in Leo that she didn't know existed. Heat-soaked, sensual and steeped in an exquisite longing, Nymph traverses the extraordinary pains, soaring pleasures and many metamorphoses it takes to finally grow up.

Nymph by Sofia Montrone - 9781837265145