A powerful debut from an Australian novelist that features one of the most likeable but contrary figures you are likely to meet in contemporary fiction. Lou Connor, a gifted, unhappy sixteen-year-old, is desperate to escape her life of poverty in Sydney. When she is offered an exchange student placement at a school in America it seems as if her dreams will be fulfilled. Her host family has a beautiful house in Illinois and couldn't be more welcoming . . . until she starts to be distubed by the suffocating and repressed atmosphere of their suburban mansion and things begin to go terribly wrong. How the Light Gets In is an acutely observed story of adolescence, reminiscent of American Beauty in its dissection of engrained prejudices and middle-class hypocrisy. In Lou Connor, Hyland has created a larger-than-life protagonist who mesmerises the reader with her vivacity and vulnerability, from hopeful beginning to unexpected, haunting end.
'The best book I read this year... Brilliantly written.' - Scotland on Sunday
'Tells of teen anguish in a world that treats such anguish as a crime. Unlike Mean Girls, Hyland's novel doesn't borrow from romantic comedy to dab out the ugliness of adolescence.' Time Out New York
'[Hyland] brings the long-forgotten teenage sensation of drowning in life's uncomprehended complexities horribly alive.' - The Times
Author
About M.J. Hyland
MJ Hyland was born in London to Irish parents in 1968. Until August 2005, she lived and worked in Australia, but she now lives in the UK, and has recently published her third novel. Her second novel, Carry Me Down, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and won the Hawthornden Prize and the Encore prize. She has also been appointed to the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester as a Lecturer in Creative Writing. Her work has been acclaimed by the likes of Ali Smith, Hilary Mantel and JM Coetzee, who commented, This is fiction writing of the highest order.
