Layla

Arriving in London, Hayleigh finds work as lap dancer ‘Layla’, intent on earning enough cash to make a fresh start. She has the wit, the looks and skilful moves, exploiting men before they can exploit her. But over the course of a chaotic week, she must make the biggest decision of her life and fight for the one thing she truly wants.

This is a brilliant and moving novel, imaginatively powerful and authentically conceived. Thirty years after the resounding success of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, and written in a similarly intense second-person narrative, Layla speaks for a new generation.

Nina de la Mer is a Scottish novelist who lives and works in Brighton. After studying modern languages at the University of Sussex, de la Mer worked for ten years in book publishing before she began writing fiction herself.