The Girls

The Girls is Emma Cline's acclaimed debut novel, a hypnotic coming-of-age story loosely inspired by the Manson Family and the murders of the late 1960s.

Northern California, 1969. Fourteen-year-old Evie Boyd is adrift — lonely, overlooked, and hungry to be seen. Then she notices a group of older girls moving through the world with careless, magnetic confidence, and above all the dark-haired, unreadable Suzanne. Evie's fascination with Suzanne pulls her onto a ramshackle ranch and into the orbit of Russell, a charismatic would-be musician who has gathered a family of devoted young women around him.

Narrated by an older Evie looking back, the novel is less about the notorious violence it circles than about the ache of adolescent longing, the intoxication of belonging, and how easily a girl's desire to be wanted can be steered toward something monstrous. Cline's prose is precise and sensuous, turning a familiar true-crime shadow into a piercing study of girlhood and complicity.