Ffion Finlay walks into the women’s residence at Trinity College, Dublin and sees her three room-mates for the first time. My God, she thinks, how shall I ever remember which is which? And Ellie, Hilary and Sandra, none of them trained as their mothers were to suppress jealousy, dislike, or malice in the name of sisterhood, detest the glamorous and self-confident Ffion on sight.

The Unfriended is an epic coming of age novel about a generation of women, played out in Ireland, where what happens during and after the Troubles becomes a metaphor for the women’s struggle to make peace with one another.

Set in the Swinging Sixties, theirs was the first generation free to claim womanhood as anything they wanted it to be. The novel follows the four women through the highs and lows of interwoven later lives until they discover that only by redefining the terms of female friendship can they take their place in the history they all helped to create.