An award-winning international author’s stunning US debut about two old college friends who reunite over a feverish weekend and are forced to confront what happened between them years ago A decade has passed since Ava spoke to Aliya. During the years of silence, Ava's life has remained at a standstill, while Aliya got the one thing they both wanted more than a book deal. Forced back together at a mutual friend’s bachelorette in London, Ava returns to Aliya’s doorstep, desperate to unpack the truth of their shared history—and what they meant to each other. When the two first met in the halls of their historic campus, their connection was electric. Aliya and Ava created a world of their own through the stories they wrote, influencing and borrowing from each other’s work. But when the end of college loomed, the real world began to pull them in opposite directions. Was their bond ever truly as strong as Aliya thought? And what would become of the stories they told themselves about each other? Weaving together the friends’ past and present, Strange Girls is an ingenious portrait of a fraught friendship, and an exploration of the ties forged in the intensity of the college experience, and the scars left when they break.
Author
Sarvat Hasin is from Pakistan. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. Her first novel, This Wide Night, was published by Penguin India and longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her second book You Can’t Go Home Again was published in 2018 and featured in Vogue India’s and The Hindu’s end of year lists. She won the Moth Writer’s Retreat Bursary in 2018 and the Mo Siewcharran Prize in 2019. Her essays and poetry have appeared in publications such as Outsiders, The Mays Anthology, English PEN, and Harper’s Bazaar. She lives in London and works at the Almeida Theatre. Her new novel, The Giant Dark, is a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. It is forthcoming from Dialogue Books on the 8th of July
