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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Each family member is heartbreakingly damaged in their own way, and they all have such incredibly unhealthy symbiotic relationships. The 'Bad Fruit' of the title is not just the referring to the mother's taste for soured juice, but giving us a metaphorical insight into the impact parenting can have on the trajectory of children's lives from generation to generation.

Bad Fruit is at once a beautiful and harrowing novel which explores family dynamics, and tracks a journey of self-discovery. 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It’s equally fascinating on the psychology of the siblings and their fathers survival of all the toxicity, damage and control and it makes for riveting reading that is increasingly shocking as you begin to get a truer picture. We meet Lily in the summer just before she’s due to start university, she’s secured a place at Oxford – her future looks bright.

It tells the story of Lily, a young woman between high school and university who is trapped between the loveless marriage of her mother and father. Throughout the story Lily suffers from hallucinations but the hallucinations are actually flashbacks to her mothers abusive childhood and they are causing Lily to suffer panic attacks.

A sense of fear, foreboding and impending doom begins to provide the storytelling and that builds in intensity and it’s palpable. Many thanks to Netgalley and Astra Publishing House for the much appreciated arc which I reviewed voluntarily and honestly. Her mother exerts an unhealthy amount of control over Lily, even forcing her to wear make-up and dye her hair black to look more like her, more Chinese: 'Despite everything Mama has done to bring out the Chinese in me, I remain resolutely myself, her whitest child.Bad Fruit heralds a seriously impressive new talent in Ella King’ CHRIS WHITAKER ‘Masterful in its evocation of the complexity of mother-daughter relationships . We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

A graduate of Faber Academy’s “Writing A Novel” course, she came third in the Aurora Prize for Short Fiction 2019 and won the Blue Pencil Agency Pitch Prize 2019. As she pieces together the truth of her mother's life, and her own, she finds herself broken and longing for oblivion.Maria Laura is a trained dietitian, almond butter lover and food enthusiast with over seven years of experience in nutrition counseling.