A darkly compelling coming-of-age story, perfect for fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies
It is the fall of 1995 at Rocky Barrens University, hidden amidst the pine trees and starry skies of Northern Ontario. Aurelle Taylor, daughter of a world-famous fashion designer, becomes the closest friend of burgeoning painter Diana Martin; they have bonded over a mutual desire to escape their wealthy families and personal tragedies and begin new lives as students at RBU.
They are closer than lovers, they are like one thing, intoxicated by their own bond, falling into the hedonistic seduction of the woods and the water at a university that is more summer camp than campus. Diana, who has lived her life under the shadow of her sadistic older brother, rockets to fame with a series of scandalous portraits of Aurelle, whose response is to tumble further into a drug-fueled escapism. Diana must choose whether to rescue her kindred spirit from destruction, or to abandon Aurelle for the fame she has forever thirsted after.
The lines between love, envy, and obsession blur in Laurie Petrou’s utterly enthralling, unceasingly tense second novel.
Laurie Petrou is an associate professor at the RTA School of Media at Ryerson University in Toronto. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled Between, was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. She is the inaugural winner of the 2016 Half the World Global Literati Award for her then-unpublished novel Sister of Mine.
Erin Bennett is an Earphones Award–winning narrator and a stage actress who played Carlie Roberts in the BBC radio drama Torchwood: Submission. She can be heard on several video games. Regional theater appearances include the Intiman, Pasadena Playhouse, Arizona Theatre Company, A Noise Within, Laguna Playhouse, and the Getty Villa. She trained at Boston University and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.