Bad Fruit: The unforgettable, gripping and highly acclaimed new crime thriller debut novel from a hot literary fiction voice of 2023

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It centers on Lily, a young biracial Singaporean British girl living in London who is experiencing alarming flashbacks that she can't place. As a parallel to exploring her own roots, Lily’s love of the origin of language is woven throughout by giving us lovely descriptions like this: 'The Latin root for ‘hallucinate’ is irresistibly beautiful, alucinari, something you would name a Victorian child. Whether you want to lose weight, monitor your blood sugar levels or simply look out for your health, you may have a running mental list of off-limits foods. When May suspects that Charlie is having an affair, there's only one thing that calms May down: a glass of perfectly, spoiled orange juice served by Lily, who must always taste it first to make sure it's just right.

She goes out of her way to please mama, including wearing yellow foundation to make her look more Asian and dying her hair black and preparing mama’s spoiled orange juice (yuk) although Lily has to taste it first (double yuk).

I enjoyed the Greenwich setting and the complexity of race and culture in the book, and found the perspective of Lily a very interesting one, especially in terms of how her childhood has impacted things like her ability to know what she likes or make choices.

Woman eating burger at the table full of healthy food Hungry woman eating black burger at the table full of fruits and vegetables on the wooden background. She struggles with the idea of leaving her close relationship with her mother behind, particularly as we gradually see the twisted dependence between mother and daughter. A beautiful, bewitching, unsettling and unputdownable dream of a book’ LISA JEWELL ____________________________________________________________ LILY IS A GOOD DAUGHTER Every evening she pours Mama a glass of perfectly spoilt orange juice.May is especially captivating: a veritable tyrant who’s also full of sympathetic, deeply human insecurities.

Just graduated from high school and waiting to start college at Oxford, Lily lives under the scrutiny of her volatile Singaporean mother, May, and is unable to find kinship with her elusive British father, Charlie. Bad Fruit heralds a seriously impressive new talent in Ella King CHRIS WHITAKERMasterful in its evocation of the complexity of mother-daughter relationships .This psychological thriller explores a complex and dark family dynamic: what do you do if the most toxic relationships in your life are with your immediate family?