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A Novel
by Sarvat Hasin
An award-winning international author's stunning US debut about two estranged friends who are forced to reunite over one feverish weekend and reckon with the choices that tore them apart.
A decade has passed since Ava spoke to Aliya. During the years of silence, Ava's life has remained at a standstill, while Aliya got the one thing they both wanted more than anything: a book deal. Forced back together at a mutual friend's bachelorette in London, Ava returns to Aliya's doorstep, desperate to unpack the truth of their shared history—and what they meant to each other.
When the two first met in the halls of their historic campus, their connection was electric. Aliya and Ava created a world of their own through the stories they wrote, influencing and borrowing from each other's work. But when the end of college loomed, the real world began to pull them in opposite directions. Was their bond ever truly as strong as Aliya thought? And what would become of the stories they told themselves about each other?
Weaving together the friends' past and present, Strange Girls is an ingenious portrait of a fraught friendship, and an exploration of the ties forged in the intensity of the college experience, and the scars left when they break.
"In this irresistible U.S. debut...Hasin crafts an intriguing story full of ambitions, jealousy, and homoerotic female friendship that readers will not be able to shake free from." —Booklist
"Intimate yet mysterious, Strange Girls is a tense and enthralling portrait of a relationship that resists definition: friendship, romance, sisterhood. Sarvat Hasin writes love in all its troubling forms with beautiful nuance, and this novel is an entire world unto itself. You'll hate to leave it." —Mikkaella Clements and Onjuli Datta, authors of The View Was Exhausting
"A novel of rare clarity and insight, aching with a complex, deeply felt love. I was captivated and moved from the outset." —Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From
This information about Strange Girls was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarvat Hasin is a novelist and dramaturg from Pakistan. She has a masters in creative writing from the University of Oxford. Her first novel, This Wide Night, was published by Penguin Random House India and longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her second book, You Can't Go Home Again, was published in 2018 and featured in Vogue India's and The Hindu's best of the year lists. Her third novel, The Giant Dark, was a runaway critical success, won the Mo Siewcharran Prize, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award. Strange Girls is her US debut. She lives in London.
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