It is summer, 1956, when fifteen-year-old Bridget first meets Isabella. In their conservative Connecticut town, Isabella is a breath of fresh air. She is worldly, alluring and brazen: an enigma.

When they receive an offer to study at the Academy in Italy, Bridget is thrilled. This is her ticket to Europe and - better still - a chance to spend nine whole months with her glamorous and unpredictable best friend.

There, lodged in a convent of nuns who have taken a vow of silence, the two girls move toward a passionate but fragile intimacy. As the year rolls on, Bridget grows increasingly fearful that she will lose Isabella's affections - and the more desperate she gets, the greater the lengths she will go to keep her.

'A beguiling whirlwind of love and obsession' 

- Elle UK

'Lush and languid, this sultry coming-of-age tale captures a fractured friendship and the yearnings of girlhood' 

- Daily Mail

'An enthralling tale of race, secrets and the desire to belong' 

-i

Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal meets Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides meets Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley, this unputdownable and lush novel had me entranced and totally absorbed in the woozy, covertly sensual world of a 1950s Italian convent. Anbara Salam has a gimlet-eyed, ferocious talent for capturing the obsessive urgency and convolutions of power and desire in adolescent experience

- Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti

‘The tender, exquisite prose brilliantly captures the feelings and fault lines in the girls’ friendship…This is a discerning look at secret infatuation and racial prejudice.’

-Publishers Weekly

I was completely captivated. Thrillingly ambitious, moving, painful and insightful. Bridget broke my heart, she's an alarmingly relatable anti heroine, and I think this book has captured something unique about the experience of jealousy, betrayal and the muddied waters that lie between friendship and obsessive love. It reminded me of The Talented Mr Ripley, but told with acute sensitivity and emotional intelligence

- Daisy Buchanan

‘Engrossing and steamy, this is The Price of Salt meets The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.’

- Booklist