True murder

by Yaba Badoe

Entrancing debut by an accomplished film-maker.Eleven year old Ajuba has been abandoned at a Devon boarding school by her Ghanaian father. Haunted by the circumstances of her mother's breakdown and the ghosts of the life she left behind in Ghana, she falls under the spell of new girl Polly Venus and her chaotic, glamorous family. But all is not what it might seem in the Venus household and Ajuba struggles to make sense of things as they tear each other apart in front of her. One day the girls find what they think are a dead kittens wrapped up in an old coat in the attic of the Venus' manor house... the bones turn out to be those of a dead baby. Obsessed with the detectives of the American magazine serial True Murder, the girls set out to find out what happened to the baby. As the summer draws to a close, three tragedies conflate, with catastrophic results.In this assured debut, Yaba Badoe explores a passionate, if unlikely friendship between two troubled adolescent girls and the dysfun