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2023: The Girls meets Lord of the Flies
2023: The Girls meets Lord of the Flies
Iris is adrift: thirty-two, newly single, living at home with her mother and working a dead end job. Her life changes when she meets the mysterious and beguiling Hazel, who lives at a women’s commune on a remote farm hidden in the Kent Downs. At the farm, the women can be loud and dirty, live and eat abundantly, under the leadership of the gargantuan Blythe.
Drawn to Hazel and the possibility of a new start away from a world of men who have only let her down, Iris throws herself into this alternative way of life, seizing on new experiences and hidden desires. But even among the women, she witnesses power struggles, cruelty and transgressions that threaten their precarious existence. When a group of men arrive on the farm, the commune’s existence is thrown into question, culminating in an act of devastating violence.
Kent Downs
The landscape in the novel is secondary to the plot and characters but it reflects the bleak aspect of the women’s journeys in the cult they find themselves in.
Breach House is where the characters go to live in their cult existence. It’s very Dickensian in every way – and similar to Bleak House. Dickens used names to show what people and places were really like and this novel is no different.
The landscape is bleak, remote and very, very claustrophobic.
The BookTrail review of Spoilt Creatures – Amy Twigg
Destination: Kent Author/guide: Amy Twigg Departure Time: 2023
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