Penance

A GRANTA BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELIST 2023'One of the summer's most talked-about books.' SUNDAY TIMES'An unmissable banger that you need to preorder immediately.' ALICE SLATER'You've never read anything like this.' JULIA ARMFIELDDo you know what happened already? Did you know her? Did you see it on the internet? Did you listen to a podcast? Did the hosts make jokes?Did you see the pictures of the body?Did you look for them?It's been years since the horrifying murder of sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson rocked Crow-on-Sea, and the events of that terrible night are now being published for the first time.That story is Penance, a dizzying feat of masterful storytelling, where Eliza Clark manoeuvres us through accounts from the inhabitants of this small seaside town. Placing us in the capable hands of journalist Alec. Z. Carelli, Clark allows him to construct what he claims is the'definitive account' of the murder - and what led up to it. Built on hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves, the result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.The only question is: how much of it is true?

Eliza Clark has relocated from her native Newcastle back to London, where she previously attended Chelsea College of Art. She works in social media marketing, having worked for women's creative writing magazine, Mslexia. In 2018, she received a grant from New Writing North's Young Writers' Talent Fund. Her debut novel Boy Parts was released by Influx Press in July 2020.

An utterly chilling, compulsive story of a murder among teenagers, on the eve of the historic Brexit vote, by a major new voice in British fiction.