Collected's 24in24 - Caly recommends... Spoilt Creatures - Amy Twigg

Caly recommends... Spoilt Creatures is lush, hazy and cultish in all the best ways. Set on an all women's commune, the novel follows Hazel's attempts to escape her painful and disappointing past through the seductive and sun-soaked life at Breach House. This read is full of a feral female rage and growing insanity that I absolutely loved. Following obsession, desire, and matriarchy reading this feels like watching a car crash in slow motion - it is gloriously addictive and intimately moving.

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Amy Twigg is one of the most exciting new novelists around: winner of the BPA Pitch Award, longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition, and selected as one of the Observer Best New Novelists. It is a real privilege for us to be one of the venues hosting her to talk about Spoilt Creatures - novel described by Alice Slater (author of Death of a Bookseller) as "compelling, cultish, and utterly feral."

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They thought they knew everything about us. The kind of women we were.

It was a place for women. A remote farm tucked away in the Kent Downs. A safe space.

When Iris – newly single and living at home with her mother – meets the mysterious and beguiling Hazel, who lives in a women’s commune, she finds herself drawn into the possibility of a new start away from the world of men who have only let her down. Here, at Breach House, the women can be loud and dirty, live and eat abundantly, all while under the leadership of their gargantuan matriarch, Blythe.

But even among the women, there are power struggles, cruelty and transgressions that threaten their precarious way of life. When a group of men arrives on the farm, the commune’s existence is thrown into question, hurtling Iris and the other women towards an act of devastating violence.

Emma says...

"An all-female community. A powerful matriarch. The women are there to escape the claustrophobia and misogyny of "normal" society - but are they really more free? 

Written with great insight about loneliness, disconnection, vulnerability, and the opportunities and dangers that come with being isolated from the world.

Striking and compelling. Don't miss it!"

Fierce and unapologetic, Spoilt Creatures is an intoxicating debut about transgression, sisterhood and the seductive nature of obsession. It pulls back the skin of patriarchal violence and examines the female rage that lurks beneath.