Girl A: The Sunday Times and New York Times global best seller, an astonishing new crime thriller debut novel from the biggest literary fiction voice of 2021

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Writing this point makes me feel like a horrible person, but I would like to have had more meat and potatoes and less ketchup and steak sauce. The Last Thing to Burn is one of the best thrillers I have read in years: I consumed it in great gulps, desperate to find out how Thanh Dao’s story played out, and then read it again, more slowly, savouring her courage and her unvanquished sense of self, despite everything. I would've liked to know how she got her education after being so far behind and what were her motivations behind being a lawyer after dealing with such a horrendous childhood.

While I appreciated how this touched on how trauma manifests itself in various forms, I would like to have seen this explored in more depth. It’s been easy enough to avoid her parents – her father never made it out of the House of Horrors he created, and her mother spent the rest of her life behind bars.This is a slow, detailed study of trauma inflicted upon a family and the effects it had on the children as they grew up, each in different households and with different manners of coping, and who began the healing at different ages. Also, I wanted way more details of what exactly happened in the House of Horrors, a lot was left to the reader’s imagination and very vague.

The real question of this novel is not what was done to these characters, but how they manage to live afterwards. It is a powerful piece of work, but that does not mean to say I enjoyed reading it, as the shifting timelines made it all the more difficult to connect with. She is compelling in some ways, understandably damaged by what she experienced as a child and very single-minded.In the first, Follow Her Home, we are introduced to Juniper Song, a Korean-American “half-employed” twentysomething from Los Angeles. After three months, she had the bones of the novel, but it would take another year to finish the first draft of Girl A, during which time she started a new job as a lawyer for Google. Although we are never privy to her father’s thoughts and he is only ever viewed through the lens of Lex I felt like I really knew him.