When Amanda Baker was fourteen, she found a letter written by her runaway mother to her unborn child: 'Dear Jeremy (or Amanda)', it began. Now, in the 1970s, she is in the hands of disaffected parents seeking to find a new school for their disappointing daughter. The happiest days of your life? Not for Baker, sixteen and sick of it as she moves miserably between lessons packed with palm fibre and the use of the dative. Baker's only solace is her fifth-form gang, The Four Mandies, and a low-calorie diet of king-sized cigarettes - until she teams up with Julia Smith, games captain and consummate game-player. So begins a passionate friendship that will threaten Baker's future, menace her sanity, and risk the betrayal of everything and everyone she holds dear...
