School, the happiest days of your life? Not for Amanda Baker, sixteen and sick of it as she moves miserably between lessons. Her only solace is her fifth form gang – the four Mandies – and a low-calorie diet of king-sized cigarettes, until she teams up with Julia Smith, games captain and consummate game player. So begins a passionate friendship that will threaten her future, menace her sanity and risk the betrayal of everything and everyone she holds dear.

The Following Girls weaves the minutiae of Seventies girlhood into an unsparing tragi-comedy of shrinking horizons, dangerous alliances and not-so-happy families.