An Experiment in Leisure

'Can I get a refund?' I asked the bus driver. 'You taking the piss, love?' It's January 2015, and Grace is supposed to have what she wants. She's swapped West Yorkshire for north London, her accent carefully edited and with a Cambridge degree under her belt. Her friends drink beer out of artful tins. She makes flat whites for people with berets. She's found a psychoanalyst. But this fantasy of metropolitan cool is turning out to be more costly than she thought, and Grace is running out of credit. Painfully adrift from her mother and twin sister and trying desperately both to forget her roots and disown her ambition, she's lost and confused in the face of complicated crises of identity, class, sex and geography.

She finds herself fleeing up and down a country on the verge of an intractable schism, and begins to reckon with her own divisions. Can she find a life amid these contradictions? Can she remember how to love? An Experiment in Leisure is a classic tale with a contemporary twist, told in an unforgettable voice that explores the emotional costs of social mobility, the possibilities of leaving and returning, the meanings of work and the ways a woman learns to love women. It's a witty, bold debut, at once a tender portrait of youth and a piercing insight into the political, cultural and economic fault lines dividing Britain today.