This debut from Rufi Thorpe grips immediately, with the sharp compelling pressure of a friend grabbing your hand in pain … a brilliantly written, probing, uneasy look at a damaged friendship between two women.

Observant, sometimes funny and continuously thought-provoking, the novel delves into the meaning of friendship, motherhood, freedom, truth and lies.

The Girls From Corona del Mar is a knockout of a debut novel . . . Her worldly, rambunctious, feminist, morally interrogative prose style galvanizes ­every episode with smart, almost cosmic insights, tough talk, elegiac moments of love, dumb wonder, and, of course, further tragic events.

Her depiction of female friendship is engaging and sharply observed . . . Seldom has Schadenfreude been more appetisingly packaged.

Rufi Thorpe's open-hearted, open-eyed debut tells the engrossing story of a long friendship between two complex women and investigates the unpredictable, often baffling ways that luck shapes all of our lives. Generous, soulful, and tough.

The Girls from Corona del Mar is a slim book that leaves a deep impression. Mia and Lorrie Ann are vivid and fully formed, and their stories provoke strong emotions that linger like lived memory. Thorpe is a gifted writer who depicts friendship with affection and brutality, rendering all its love and heartbreak in painstaking strokes.

It’s hard to believe [this] is Rufi Thorpe’s first novel — she writes like someone who has been through the wringer, like writers of the past who wrote because they needed to, because they had a problem with the way life was and had to tell someone. The Girls from Corona del Mar belongs in a different era, like something that could have been written during the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

The Girls from Corona del Mar’s raw, lyrical tone resonates—a gratifyingly honest dispatch from the battle lines of young womanhood.

Rufi Thorpe had me at the first line in her funny, sad, delightful debut novel, The Girls from Corona del Mar. A story about friendship, love, loss, and the sheer unexpectedness of life. Reading this book was like getting to know old friends; I was sorry when I turned the last page.

The Girls from Corona del Mar is one of those rare books that breaks down the wall between reality and fiction; the entire time I read this book I ached as if it were my own best friend whose life was unraveling before me. Day and night I thought of her—I still think of her! Rufi Thorpe is a brilliant writer and this is a beautiful first book.

The Girls from Corona del Mar is unflinchingly realistic in its portrayal of life's twists and turns. Yet it's also full of heart. As Thorpe chronicles a complicated friendship across decades, continents and reversals in fortune, she brings to life two unforgettable characters.

What’s most impressive is its incredible vitality, its searing intensity. Turn off your phone, close the blinds, and let it take you.

It’s a superbly written novel, with a natural almost conversational tone that makes for an easy read despite the often hard-hitting subject matter … I simply couldn’t put it down. There’s a magnetic and moving quality to Thorpe’s writing that had me hooked from start to end. An absorbing story of female friendship in all its ugliness and beauty.

[A] gripping debut novel … Not just a coming-of-age novel, this refreshingly honest book explores the myth of the perfect friendship and what it really means to be a loyal friend.

Mia, the extremely intelligent narrator, will make you think about friendship, luck, and the way we see the lives of others though our own eyes. I loved it.

A tale of love, death, beauty, murder and obsession...told in a free-form syncopated prose so rhythmic that you can almost imagine Nina Simone singing it

Sumell’s compulsively readable novel in stories introduces a restless underachiever as irresistible as he is detestable, surely one of the most morally, violently, socially complex personalities in recent literature…. Sumell’s debut is humbly macho, provoking outrage, pity, and finally tenderness. Perhaps this is a book readers will hate to love, but only because it feels, like Alby, all too real

There's a special alchemy here that you are going to want to witness...offhand and funny, and then the tender heart emerges from the shadows, so tender, and comes at us with a knife. Every story here is two: one the fun, the other the blade

Focusing on the single reality that human beings die, Sumell wakes up, and boy oh boy is he ever pissed off... Sumell, on Alby's behalf, fights back, and he fights dirty. Using cunning, reckless rage, and bravura comic timing, he kicks death's ass... Bystanders get hurt, the reader got hurt, but at least I was reminded that I was part of this whole shitty deal. You'd like to believe that there are consolations, and there are. Being sentient, for example. Being able to read, for instance. Having read Making Nice

The self-destructive narrator lashes out with reckless intimacy, random violence, and an often hilarious misplaced rage that shoots to wound rather than kill. What saves its victims and the reader is a naked rendering of a heart sorting through its broken pieces to survive. The result is an eloquent empathy, an uplift of hope-filled grace

Making Nice will grab you by the throat, raise your blood pressure, and cause you to chortle in a crowd. It will also break your heart. When they're writing the history of the best characters of our time, Alby will be there, telling the others to get in line

Making Nice is a little bit special. A truly original portrayal of grief

Making Nice has an anarchic humour and a goofy, ingenuous humanity that makes every page feel new… Some jokes…aren’t just funny, they are insightful, unexpected and hilarious. In its rampage to nowhere, Making Nice achieves the remarkable feat of making it feel better to travel hopelessly than to arrive.