Honey

I didn’t like to perform. I liked to be loved.’Like Daisy Jones soaked in Britney Spears’ Curious’and HOLLY BOURNE’It’s a delightfully bubblegum novel of hot summer nostalgia’and LITHUB’A sexy swagger of a debut’and EMMA STRAUBIt is 1997, and Amber Young has received a life-changing call. It’s a chance thousands of girls would die for: the opportunity to join girl group Cloud9 in Los Angeles and escape her small town. She quickly finds herself in the orbits of fellow rising stars Gwen Morris, a driven singer-dancer, and Wes Kingston, a member of the biggest boy band in the world, ETA.As Amber embarks on her solo career and her fame intensifies, she increasingly finds herself reduced to a body, a voice, an object. Surrounded by the wrong kind of people and driven by a desire for recognition and success, for love and sex, for agency and connection, Amber comes of age at a time when the kaleidoscope of public opinion can distort everything, and one mistake can shatter a career.Inspired by the starlets of the 90s and noughties who became as infamous for their personal lives as their hypersexualised music videos and lyrics,and Honeyand is a novel about the journey from girlhood to womanhood and how far we are willing to go in the pursuit of love . . .