There’s one book capturing US readers and headlines at the moment, and that’s The End Of Everything by Megan Abbott (from the same team behind The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and Room by Emma Donoghue). The book is being billed as one of the biggest novels of 2011 by Time magazine and Entertainment Weekly.

Set in Eighties Detroit, it’s about the inseparable friendship of two 13-year-old girls which is torn apart when one of them goes missing. And, like The Lovely Bones, it cleverly catapults you back to your early teens. “I based the story on my childhood best friend,” Abbott told Stylist. “Her family was the one everyone wanted to be but slowly I watched them be torn apart by tragedy. This book is about realising that nothing is ever how it seems from the outside.”