
Love story and un-love story intertwine in the brand-new thriller-romance from the globally bestseller author of The One Memory of Flora Banks, Emily Barr. Venice, 2024 Hazel is on a spontaneous holiday with her stepbrother, Enzo, and best friend, Phoebe. They have just helped Hazel escape her increasingly destructive relationship with her older boyfriend, and have come away to celebrate her being her again. In the dreamy Italian sunshine, Hazel is managing to relax, to stop looking over her shoulder in case Freddie has followed her here. But there’s a girl she keeps seeing in the city. A girl with beautiful eyes. And whenever Hazel sees her and their eyes meet, something strange seems to happen - de ja vu, at first, and then even stranger things that make her wonder if she’s really in Venice at all . . . England, 2022 Hazel goes to see an up-and-coming local band with Enzo and some friends. She locks eyes with the lead singer, Freddie, during a song, and he finds her afterwards and slips her his number. She’s not even 16. He is ten years older. She knows it’s stupid. She didn’t even think it was boys she was into. Things with Freddie start wonderfully - flowers, dates, he even writes a song about her. It’s everything a girl could dream of. Until it’s absolutely not . . .
Author
Emily Barr worked as a journalist in London, but always hankered after a quiet room and a book to write. She went travelling for a year, writing a column in the Guardian about it as she went, and it was there that she had an idea for a novel set in the world of backpackers in Asia. This became Backpack, which won the WH Smith New Talent Award. She has since written eleven more adult novels published in the UK and around the world, and a novella, Blackout, for the Quick Reads series. Her twelfth novel, The Sleeper, is a psychological thriller set on the London to Cornwall sleeper train. In 2013 she went to Svalbard with the idea of setting a thriller in the Arctic. The book that came out of it was The One Memory of Flora Banks, a thriller for young adults, which attracted universal interest from publishers before being bought pre-emptively by Penguin earlier this year. It will be published globally in January 2017. She lives in Cornwall with her partner and their children.