Ralph and Molly Fawcett are intelligent, difficult siblings growing up inside the suffocating manners of an upper-middle-class California family.

After illness sends them to their uncle’s ranch in Colorado, they find a rougher world of animals, work, weather and adult violence—one that seems to promise freedom from the performance of being well-bred children. At its centre is Molly: sharp, secretive, increasingly estranged from the femininity being prepared for her. Stafford writes adolescence not as gradual maturation but as a brutal split between the self one experiences and the person other people insist on seeing. Molly and Ralph’s intimacy is fierce but unstable, damaged by puberty, shame, rivalry and the unequal futures assigned to boys and girls. The mountain lion they hunt becomes something wild onto which the family projects fear, mastery and desire.

First published in 1947, the novel is remarkable for its psychological coldness and exact sensory intelligence. Stafford’s prose is elegant without being consoling; she observes domestic cruelty, bodily awkwardness and childhood perception with the precision of someone dissecting a social ritual after the guests have gone home. This edition includes a foreword by Hilton Als.

Faber Editions, 2023 paperback; first printing of this edition. Very good condition with light shelf wear.