Exurbia

Los Angeles, 1985: Reagan is a few months into his second term, and the economy, fuelled by tax cuts, is booming; but the increasing stand-off between the superpowers threatens to wipe out the world, AIDS is a growing epidemic, and fifty per cent of marriages end in divorce. Good Morning, America.

Ed Valencia is seventeen; he and his crew, the Rats, are marked out by their Mohawks as troublemakers - by teachers, by the cops. It is the punk scene they inhabit that has given them sustenance, and a grasp of a world beyond Yum Yum Donuts and TV re-runs; the punk scene, in fact, that has given them some ideals, some belief.

Lise Anderson is thirteen, and desperate to be cool - despite the best efforts of her mother. She loves the mall, hot pink lipstick and dangerous-looking boys, but her friends, Trish and Jen, seem to be privy to secrets - about fashion, about sex - that no one will tell her.

And then there is Voyd, known by his family as Boyd, at fourteen a frontline warrior for the revolutionary right. While his parents jet across the country, speculating and accumulating, Voyd, alone in a house filled with everything he wants and not one thing he needs, has devoted himself to the FFF gang and the cause of keeping the nation white.

Exurbia tells the story of these three lost souls, and of the intersection and ultimately violent collision of their lives. In haunting, angry and beautiful prose, Molly McGrann explores the margins of 1980s America, and asks questions not only about where we are going, but about how we got here in the first place.

Praise for 360 Flip:

'Terrific. Totally persuasive voices; vertiginous, tragic and funny . . . I read it in a couple of compulsive gulps' JONATHAN LETHEM

'Molly McGrann's elegant and edgy debut scratches the picture-perfect surface to reveal the shabby dissatisfactions behind the American Dream . . McGrann's prose glimmers' Elle