Landfall

For fans of Jeffrey Eugenides''s The Virgin Suicides, Landfall is a clear-eyed, witty and warm debut novel by former Granta editor Helen Gordon, that marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.

Alice Robinson, art critic for a magazine so fashionable it''s just gone out of business, finds herself agreeing to housesit for her parents. Moving back home to a suburbia she thought long behind her, she finds herself reconnecting with a different landscape, a fraught and painful past.

For everywhere Alice turns she finds traces of her sister, who went missing as a teenager. Can she stop her old life intruding on the present? Should she even try? What does Alice''s new future look like?

''An intriguing novel . . . a hipster version of Margaret Atwood''s Surfacing'' Metro

''A memorable novel. I loved the pace and verve of Alice''s voyage from Shoreditch to suburbia, and the unexpectedness of the story as it swerves past the familiar into a dangerous and beautiful unknown'' Helen Dunmore

''Compulsively readable'' Independent on Sunday

''Fine writing . . . wrapped in an arresting evocation of timelessness'' Guardian

''Brooding and haunting'' Tatler

''Uplifting, witty, wonderfully unsettling'' Psychologies

''Beautifully descriptive, with a cliff-hanger finale'' Easy Living

Helen Gordon was born in 1979 and grew up in Croydon. She currently lives in east London and is a former associate editor of Granta magazine. Landfall is her first novel.