Young Women by Jessica Moor

‘Everyone's got that history, I guess. Everyone's got a story.’

When Emily meets the enigmatic and dazzling actress Tamsin, her life changes. Drawn into Tamsin's world of Soho living, boozy dinners, and cocktails at impossibly expensive bars, Emily's life shifts from black and white to technicolour and the two women become inseparable.

Tamsin is the friend Emily has always longed for; beautiful, fun, intelligent and mysterious and soon Emily is neglecting her previous life - her work assisting vulnerable women, her old friend Lucy - to bask in her glow. But when a bombshell news article about a decades-old sexual assault case breaks, Emily realises that Tamsin has been hiding a secret about her own past. Something that threatens to unravel everything . . .

Young Women is a razor sharp novel that slices to the heart of our most important relationships, and asks how complicit we all are in this world built for men.

About the author

Jessica Moor studied English at Cambridge before completing a Creative Writing MA at Manchester University. Her debut novel Keeper was published in 2020 to rave reviews and critical acclaim. Jessica Moor was selected as one of the Observer's debut novelists of 2020, and her debut, Keeper was chosen by the Sunday Times, Independent and Cosmopolitan as one of their top debuts of the year. Keeper was nominated for the Desmond Elliott Prize and an Edgar Award. Young Women is her second novel.

Follow Jessica on Twitter @jessicammoor

Review

‘Young Women’ is a gripping take on the #metoo movement that takes it into another direction and questions whether there is a responsibility to report these matters or not, questions victimhood, and it a complex look at female friendship. At first, I thought it was going to be a story about a dark and obsessive female friendship. In a way, it was but it felt very much like a book of two halves, the first exploring this concept and then it jumped to the #metoo stuff. I felt it could have intertwined the two sides a bit more and thus would have given the reader a more seamless reading experience. But then I instantly question myself saying ‘was the jarring switcheroo a reflection on how shocking the #metoo movement was’? See this is what I love about books, they are subjective for the reader and everyone takes something different away from them.

Let me know if you read this one.