From a bestselling author, SPECIAL is a chilling and subversive debut novel about adolescent girls forging their identities - at any price.A group of teenage schoolgirls are on a field trip to the Forest of Dean. Vain, spoilt and interested primarily in sex, alcohol and outfits, the girls squabble and smoke, skive and bitch, torment their teachers and betray their friends, and the reader bears witness to the development and disintegration of relationships. So far, so typical. But this world of teenagers is a hall of mirrors, where the everyday can become monstrous, and nothing is quite what you expect. Soon enough something dark and sinister begins to move underneath the surface.

Bella Bathurst was born in 1969. She is the author of the prize-winning non-fiction book, The Lighthouse Stevensons. She lives in London.