‘A hard book to stop reading’: Claire Messud joins us at the Bookshop

We’re looking forward to welcoming Claire Messud to the Bookshop on Thursday 21 September to discuss her new novel The Burning Girl with Alex Clark. First hailed in the pages of the LRB as ‘a deeply interesting young writer’ by Penelope Fitzgerald, Messud has, says the New York Times, ‘specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives’.

In The Burning Girl, Messud turns her attention to the question of adolescent female friendship – or more precisely, its breakdown as friends mature. She ‘captures young adolescence vividly and unjudgmentally . . . this is a hard book to stop reading,’ wrote Ursula Le Guin in the Guardian, while Lucy Scholes’ review in the Independent praised ‘the precise, elegant prose we’ve come to expect from this master storyteller’.

Messud will be in conversation with the writer and broadcaster Alex Clark, who has reviewed Messud’s work for the LRB and profiled Messud for the Guardian. Book tickets here.