On New Year's Eve 1976, in a Swiss hotel disco, ten-year-old Poppy meets nine-year-old Dan. They dance, share a Coke, slip out into a games-room cupboard and kiss. He goes home to Manchester, then Dublin. She goes home to Sloane Square, to a politician father, an absent mother and a sister losing herself faster than anyone notices. Decades later, addressing the letter to Dan she never sent, Poppy looks back at the moment everything turned: the New Year a year on when her father called her, in front of the children, a whore. From punk London to 1980s New York, drama school, anorexia, near-suicide and the long climb back, this is a debut about the single sentence that shapes a life.

A debut novel about the single moment that infects a life.