Machine - Susan Steinberg

A local girl drowns one night in summer on the shore. As a seething guilt settles over the teenagers of this fractured town, another girl narrates the experience of their hard-partying, fiercely divided collective. Her parents' marriage violently collapsing, her brother spiralling into increasing destructiveness, she sinks further back into the events leading up to this tragedy and the deeper fault-lines in the community. Daringly experimental, Machine is a bold interrogation of gender, class and privilege, and the disintegration of identity in the shadow of trauma. A thrilling first novel from a unique talent, this is suspenseful, audacious, riveting literary fiction.