HOW TO BE A FRENCH GIRL

Weatherglass Books, 2023

If you no longer want to be you, be careful who you become.

She’s from Southend. She wanted to be an artist and ended up at the best art school in the country. But that didn't work out.

Now she works as a receptionist in an IT firm, where her only creative outlet is arranging the sandwiches she’s ordered in for other people’s meetings. And she still lives in Southend.

Outside work, soulless sex has become a symptom of her boredom.

Then Gustave appears: older, perceptive, attentive. And French.

He’s her way out, she thinks. But more than that, a chance to be creative again: to become someone new.

How to be a French Girl is a fierce, disturbing and funny debut novel about desire, art and what we’ll risk to change ourselves.

“What a superb debut novel. Rose Cleary writes like Jean Rhys on Bumble - of artistic postures and authentic pain, desperate sex and female abjection. How to be a French Girl is an engrossing, unflinching tale of youthful unravelling and drastic acting out, with the devil very much in the details.”

ROB DOYLE (THRESHOLD)

“How to be a French Girl is a compulsive account of dating apps, doomed ambitions and obsessive desire. It drew me in like a thriller. This is an unnerving and darkly compelling debut.”

NAOMI BOOTH (EXIT MANAGEMENT)

“A poisoned love story about class, art, work, and the awesome gullibility of young women.”

DAISY HILDYARD (EMERGENCY)

3:AM Magazine published an extract, which you can read here.

You can order direct from Weatherglass here.