How the Light Gets In

How the Light Gets In

by M J Hyland (Author)

Synopsis

Lou Connor, a gifted, unhappy sixteen-year-old, is desperate to escape her life of poverty in Sydney. When she is offered an exchange student placement at a school in America it seems as if her dreams will be fulfilled. Her host family has a beautiful house and couldn't be more welcoming ...until she starts to be suffocated by the repressed atmosphere of their suburban mansion and things start to go badly wrong. In Lou Connor, Hyland creates a larger-than-life protagonist who mesmerises the reader with her vivacity and vulnerability, from hopeful beginning to unexpected, haunting end.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 336
Publisher: Walker
Published: 02 Jun 2011

ISBN 10: 1406334499
ISBN 13: 9781406334494
Children’s book age: 12+ Years

Media Reviews
Even edgier, if less ethereal, is How the Light Gets In, which charts the progress of Lou, a bright teenager from a poor suburb of Sydney who wins a place on an exchange programme in the United States...There's drink, drugs, teenage fumbling and a dark undertow as Hyland throws a harsh spotlight on the turmoil of growing up. * Daily Telegraph *
Yearning for whatever adults don't want you to have, while tormented by visions of being able to grab it with no need to say please or thank you, is the essence of the teenage state. How the Light Gets In is one of the best evocations of that state I have read, and cries out for the young adult readership that this co-publication is designed to attract. * The Guardian Online *
Author Bio
MJ Hyland was born in London to Irish parents in 1968. Until August 2005, she lived and worked in Australia, but she now lives in the UK, and has recently published her third novel. Her second novel, Carry Me Down, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and won the Hawthornden Prize and the Encore prize. She has also been appointed to the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester as a Lecturer in Creative Writing. Her work has been acclaimed by the likes of Ali Smith, Hilary Mantel and JM Coetzee, who commented, This is fiction writing of the highest order.