Dana Czapnik’s debut follows Lucy Adler, a seventeen-year-old basketball obsessive moving through early 1990s New York with too much intelligence and way too many feelings.

On the court, she is precise, funny, aggressive, alive; off it, she is trying to work out friendship, desire, ambition, gender, art, family, and the embarrassing theatre of wanting to be seen properly.

This sits in that sweet, bruised coming-of-age zone: literary but readable, sharp but not icy, nostalgic without embalming itself. There’s basketball, Coney Island, teenage intensity, New York bohemia, female artists, friendship, feminism, hunger, envy, and the specific ache of being clever before you have any real power. A good one for readers of contemporary literary fiction, young women in cities, messy self-making, 90s New York, and novels where sport becomes less a theme than a whole private language.

Faber & Faber paperback edition, published in 2019. ISBN 9780571355938. Good second-hand condition, with light shelfwear and a small crease/knock visible to the top front corner.