My Absolute Darling is a dark and unputdownable novel about a terrifying situation and mindset forced onto a teenage girl and her battle to escape this life she is so used to. Turtle is a fourteen-year-old who lives with her father in a house filled with guns and supplies for the apocalypse he believes will be inevitable. He tells her how much he loves her, but she has never known a friend and is trapped by his creed and rules. The time comes for Turtle to fight to survive and to learn to escape from all she has ever known.

Tallent writes with a distinctively detailed style that carefully captures the ordered world in which Turtle lives and depicts her unnerving mindset as someone who has grown up knowing love and pain deeply entwined. She is a compelling character: heartbreaking in her internalised hatred and her difficulty relating to anyone, clearly intelligent and adaptable, and hard to forget once the book is put down. The narrative unfolds with tension, closely focusing on an event or occasion then jumping forward in a tightly paced manner.

The paranoia of her monstrous father is contrasted with the hippy attitudes of other locals, showing the difference between a distrust of The Man and an all-consuming belief in protecting someone who is actually being deeply scarred in those attempts. Apart from a few references by other characters, it is easy to forget the modern setting of the novel, which both gives it a timeless feel and shows Turtle’s disconnect from the world. Altogether, the writing style and seeing it all from Turtle’s perspective makes the reader feel unnerved and trapped, really getting across the horror of what is going on despite it not being described in a hysterical way.

To read the novel is to be horrified at times and to wish it was possible to reach into the narrative and make things better, in a similar way to books like Yanagihara’s A Little Life. Tallent creates a paranoid and abusive world that can be difficult to read at times, but also can be uplifting and gives a voice to a character who so often keeps to virtual silence.

I thought My Absolute Darling was outstandingly good. It is beautifully written, remarkably insightful and completely gripping.

This is the story of 12-year-old Julia "Turtle" Alveson who lives with her survivalist father on the fringes of society in Mendocino, California. She is skilled in guns, survival skills and so on, but at sea with other people and in social situations. Told entirely from Turtle's point of view, we see her struggles with understanding her father's obsessive and abusive behaviour which she (and probably he) believes to be what love is. As events and growing maturity begin to make her more aware, the tension between what she has believed and what she begins to recognise as reality grows and Turtle has to wrestle with where her future lies and how, if at all, she can realise it.

This doesn't sound like a great read on the face of it, but it is. I genuinely found it hard to put this book down; the story is gripping, with some passages of incredible tension and real adventure, and Gabriel Tallent takes us right inside that young woman's head with her confusion, self-doubt (often spilling into self-loathing) and resilience in a way which I have seldom experienced. The portraits of her and of her monstrous father are fantastically real, and I found the entire thing completely convincing. Be warned that there are some quite horrifying scenes of child abuse, but they are absolutely justified in the context and excellently judged - a world away from the often offensively facile use of child abuse as a theme in run-of-the-mill thrillers.

The prose is excellent. Gabriel Tallent writes in a measured, unmelodramatic but rather lyrical style, which brings the people, especially Turtle, wonderfully to life. Just as a tiny example, we get sentences like this: "She waits there in the grass, feeling her every thought stored up and inarticulate within her," and this sort of brilliant distillation of internal experience shines through the book. The sense of place is excellent and dialogue is completely convincing; I especially liked some wonderful episodes of the jokey, wordy, literate chatter of two High School boys as it contrasted with Turtle's near-silent inarticulacy.

I find it hard to express quite how good I thought this book was. It is a rare combination of an utterly gripping story, excellent writing and genuine depth of content. Very, very warmly recommended.