'A beguiling whirlwind of love and obsession' Elle
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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 towards 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.
Belladonna is a hypnotizing coming-of age story set against the stunning and evocative backdrop of rural Northern Italy. Anbara Salam tells a story of friendship and obsession, desire and betrayal, and the lies we tell in order to belong.
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'An enthralling tale of race, secrets and the desire to belong' i
'Lush and languid, this sultry coming-of-age tale captures a fractured friendship and the yearnings of girlhood' Daily Mail
'Thrillingly ambitious, moving, painful and insightful. This book captures something unique about the experience of jealousy, betrayal and the muddied waters that lie between friendship and obsessive love' Daisy Buchanan
'The Virgin Suicides meets Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley, this unputdownable and lush novel had me entranced' Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti
Anbara Salam is half-Palestinian and half-Scottish, and grew up in London. She has a PhD in Theology and is now living and working in Oxford. She spent six months living on a small South Pacific island, and her experiences there served as the inspiration for her first novel, Things Bright and Beautiful.
Reminiscent of the steamy passion found in The Talented Mr Ripley, this novel is a beguiling whirlwind of young love and obsession
Elle
An enthralling tale of race, secrets and the desire to belong
i
Lush and languid, this sultry coming-of-age tale captures a fractured friendship and the yearnings of girlhood
Daily Mail
This raw and tender tale brims with vivid prose, whether the lush descriptions of the Italian countryside or Bridget's tortured intimate thoughts.
A searingly honest coming of age story which steals your heart
Sunday Mirror
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