The last hope of girls - Susie Boyt

Newly installed as resident caretaker of four half-derelict West End flats, Martha Brazil can scarcely believe her luck. After years of stuffy bedsits and suburban flatshares, the future seems electric with the promise of renovation and repair. Surely anything might happen to a girl who embraces it with gusto... But even in her new home painful memories will intrude: of a high-handed father, a mother willing to embrace only the chronically dispossessed, and a beloved brother whose antics have estranged him from the family.

Susie Boyt is the author of four acclaimed novels and writes a weekly column about fashion for the Financial Times. She also works part-time as a bereavement counsellor

Her graceful writing is unfailingly controlled... delicately touching... wonderful mordancy
Times Literary Supplement

'Brilliant! Wonderfully original... marvellously vivid' Wendy Perriam

'A very sensitively observed novel, as though the central character has one less layer of skin than other people. It is written with a very visual, almost painterly eye for detail, even when the details are bleak' Daily Mail

'The touching, romantic tale of a young woman adrift amid the bright lights of London' Mirror

'The stylish story of a young woman who, finding herself caretaker of an Oxford Street mansion block, tries to take life by the scruff of the neck' Conde Nast Traveller

'Sometimes, Martha wishes that her experience of family life was more like that of other people. Luckily for us, it's not, for the heroine of Boyt's third novel is a wonderful creation' Marie Claire

`Boyt has a painter's eye for colour and detail... her text is as alive with symbolism as a Holbein painting... very likeable' Independent on Sunday

'Thoughtful and emotional... A really meaty read' Company

` Unconventional, unsettling and beautifully written... Witty, laser-assisted vignettes suffuse THE LAST HOPE OF GIRLS... What Boyt brings to the aloof-spinster genre is an optimistic belief in her heroine's moral energy' Lynne Truss, Sunday Times (lead fiction review)