Snowflake

The difference between a victim and survivor is the ability to tell your story. Eighteen-year-old Debbie lives on a dairy farm in Kildare with her mother and her uncle Billy who lives in a caravan in the garden. Who knows what happened to Billy's dreams, but now his company is a bottle of whiskey and the stars that hang overhead.

Debbie's mum Maeve's grip on reality is increasingly tenuous, and she spends her days recording her dreams, which are more real than her daylight hours. This world is Debbie's normal, but she is about to step into life as a university student in Dublin. There she meets Xanthe and a new gang of friends, finding it increasingly difficult to navigate between the world of home, and her new life, coming to see that sometimes even the maddest of families are our real places of safety.

A startling, honest, laugh and cry novel about growing up and leaving home, only to find that you've taken it with you, Snowflake is a novel for a generation, and for everyone who's taken those first, terrifying steps towards adulthood.