The Bell Jar (9780571226160)

A student from Boston wins a guest editorship on a national magazine, and finds a new world at her feet. Her New York life is crowded with possibilities, so the choice of future is overwhelming. She is faced with the perennial problems of morality, behaviour and identity.

Working in New York one hot summer, Esther Greenwood is on the brink of her future. Yet she is also on the edge of a darkness that makes her world both increasingly unreal and more sharply felt. Plath describes Esther's experience with a searing clarity: the wide-eyed country girls; her sharp-as-nails friend Doreen and her crazed men-friends; hot dinner dances and nights in New York. But it is a vision coloured by breakdown, making this one of the most vivid, troubled novels about the struggle to grow up.