One pill makes you smaller - Lisa Dierbeck

Eleven-year-old Alice Duncan - the protagonist of Lisa Dierbeck's electrifying novel of 1970s' counterculture - finds herself in a predicament. Abandoned by her carefree, jet-set mother and emotionally tortured artist father, Alice falls under the erratic supervision of her sixteen-year-old aunt Esm.

Yet, when Alice goes to North Carolina to attend the Balthus Institute, an unorthodox art school for gifted children, circumstances go from bad to worse. Possessing 'a kid's head grafted on a woman's body', young Alice faces the disturbing realities of reckless excess and an accelerated adolescence.

Inspired by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, this electrifying tale vividly portrays the more sinister reaches of 1970s American counter-culture and is an audacious, fiercely original account of a young girl's crossing into adulthood.