Alice and the Fly

For fans of Mark Haddon, Joe Dunthorne and The Inbetweeners, ALICE AND THE FLY is a journey into the spider-filled corners of a very unusual teenager's mind. Greg - or Fly, as his Nan calls him - absolutely hates spiders. He has a proper phobia of Them. They make him have fits. His therapist thinks that one day he'll grow out of his condition (and be able to do PE again or say his S's properly), but for now, he's not the most popular boy at his school. To make things worse, his older sister has turned into a dance-crazy Vulture, his mother is obsessively redecorating the house, and his dad hasn't been home for three days. His English teacher, Miss Hayes, thinks it might help him to start writing down his thoughts. But it's hard to write to himself, because he already knows everything he has to say. So he starts writing to you, instead. You are Alice - with red curls and a black eye, sunglasses and a sweet smile. Alice lives on an estate in the Pitt. Greg has never talked to Alice, but she smiled at him once. He thinks she's way prettier than Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, and he's worried about her - worried that she's started dating Goose, worried that her dad gave her that black eye. When she saves him from an assault in the Pitt, they form a sort-of friendship. But one bitter winter's night at a house party, things between them start to go very wrong indeed. With warmth, sensitivity and a generous streak of dark humour, Rice tells a Romeo and Juliet story of two teenagers, star-cross'd in their own fashion, set in striving, middle-class modern Britain.