Girls

Ingrid Olssen was a celebrated artist, and the press wrote about her at length when she died. Some of what they wrote called her brilliant. Some called her a terrible mother to her two daughters, Mattie and Nora.

Her last request is specific and hard to carry out: Ingrid wants her ashes thrown into the canyon and her paintings thrown into the sea. That means destroying the work that made her name, and the world is unlikely to see another Ingrid Olssen exhibition.

Mattie and Nora set out on a trip to fulfil her wishes, though neither is willing at the start. It is an all-or-nothing journey for them both.

As the sisters travel, they begin to pick apart the painful scars of their childhood. The bond that held them together through those years may also be what breaks them.

The novel is a family story about sisters, a difficult mother, art and celebrity. The tone is emotionally heavy but carries real humour, and it moves between the tender and the shocking. Readers who liked Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason or Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid are the audience it is aimed at.