Girls they write songs about - Carlene Bauer

'The instant feminist classic our generation has been waiting for' Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can't Sleep

What happens when growing up means growing apart?

1997. New York.

Earnest, bookish Rose.

Brash, extrovert Charlotte.

When they moved to New York in the late nineties, coffee cost less than a dollar and you could still smoke in bars. You could stay up drinking all night, sat in vinyl booths patched up with duct tape.

Everyone has their own New York, and for Rose and Charlotte it was a place to feed their ambition, a place to dance and party and fall in love, far from the suburbs they once called home. It was New York City, and it was everything they ever wanted.

Their friendship was different too: intense and life-changing. The kind that only happens once. The kind that couldn't last forever.

In Carlene Bauer's exuberant novel, Rose and Charlotte look back and reckon with the loss of a friendship that helped define them, shaping their lives more than any love affair.

'Excellent... Full of texture and feeling.' Vivian Gornick