But the Girl

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

A wry and razor-sharp coming-of-age novel about belonging, alienation, and the exquisite pleasure and pain of girlhood

I used to have this line I saved and brought out for grant applications and writers festivals - that having been Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Esther Greenwood all my life, my writing was an opportunity for the reader to have to be me

Girl is spending the spring at an artist's residency in Scotland. Far from her home in Australia and her tight-knight Malaysian family, she is meant to be writing a postcolonial novel and working on a PhD on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. But she can't stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of her parents and grandmother who raised her. How can she reconcile their dreams for her with her lived reality? Did Sylvia Plath have this problem? What even is a 'postcolonial novel'? And what if the story of becoming yourself is not about carving out a new identity but learning to understand the people who shaped you?

©2023 Jessica Zhan Mei Yu (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • But the Girl is a vivid novel of consciousness with a delightful sense of play. Jessica Zhan Mei Yu writes with striking originality that combines the irreverent and the philosophical about the ambiguities and ambivalences of contemporary life. A wonderful new novel for a metamodern world

    Brandon Taylor, author of THE LATE AMERICANS

  • Impressive… Yu is the writer Girl wishes to be – remaking, in her own image, the young female protagonist, the Künstlerroman, the postcolonial novel, and the art of writing itself

    Guardian

  • Ambitious… Embarks on an intellectual journey into the contradiction of seeing and unseeing yourself as a person of colour in a much-loved canonical book

    Daily Mail

  • Thrilling… But the Girl is a debut that heralds a skilled and singular new talent

    List

  • A unique and meaningful novel: refreshingly unsentimental, written with a directness that is both self-effacing and wry. The voice sometimes recalls Lucia Berlin, JD Salinger or Lorrie Moore but it’s entirely her own

    Sharlene Teo, author of PONTI

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