Father Figure

Natalie Portman’s November Book Club pick

By: Emma Forrest

Narrated by: Ruth Lass

'Literary, thrilling, hugely funny, with a massive heart' SARA PASCOE
'So wild and gripping' DAVID NICHOLLS
'I tore through it' NUSSAIBAH YOUNIS
'A ferocious coming-of-age story' EMMA JANE UNSWORTH
'A truly beautiful story about longing and London' DAISY BUCHANAN

Gail is in trouble at school. Saint Saviours, the exclusive private girls school that she attends on a scholarship, cannot contain her. Impulsive, bored and looking for someone to adore, she is at that dangerous age when you want to be picked up by men and then driven home by your mother.

Ezra is rich, powerful and at the top of his game. His comfortable middle age is tainted only by the knowledge that, in his heady youth, he'd loved new wave music and had people killed - and by his crushing anxieties about his teenage daughter, Agata.

When Agata starts at Saint Saviour's, Gail and Ezra's paths cross, and with an unstoppable momentum, their lives intertwine in ways more dangerous than either could ever predict.©2025 Emma Forrest

Critic reviews

Bristling with sexual, political and emotional angst, this finely tuned coming-of-age tale thrives on the grey areas of adolescence . . . As a novelist, Forrest tends to reserve judgment: her characters are not likable, but they are tender. They feel things very deeply, and Forrest treats each one with distinction. You could never mistake them for anyone else (Ella Risbridger)

I so enjoyed this novel of teenage obsession and chaos, a north London My Summer of Love, so wild and gripping (David Nicholls)

It's a story I fell into, and lived in. Gail belongs in the canon of all-time great heroines - wild, weird, vulnerable and powerful. Father Figure is a truly beautiful story about longing and London - I adore the wit, tenderness and ferocity of Emma Forrest's writing, and I'm going to be thinking about this book for a long time (Daisy Buchanan, author of INSATIABLE)

Literary, thrilling, hugely funny, with a massive heart. The perfect read (Sara Pascoe, author of WEIRDO)

I am pained by how good this book is - gorgeous, glorious writing; a heady coming-of-age tale and an utterly compelling literary thriller. What a treat! (Lucy Foley, author of THE GUEST LIST)

I am obsessed with Emma Forrest. Everything she writes is delicious. Her observations of humanity, in all its messy glory, are as funny as they are deep. A true stylist, she writes with wit, grit, immense charm and inimitable panache. No other writer is capable of such tenderness one moment and then such skewering the next. Father Figure is both a ferocious coming-of-age and a fearless examination of the nature of obsession. It's mothers and daughters and female friends and older men, all under a red-lit microscope. It is that rarest kind of book - one that feels simultaneously like home and adventure. I kissed it when I finished it (Emma Jane Unsworth, author of ADULTS)

Funny, rich, complex, multidimensional, with a heroine as tender as she is unhinged - I tore through it (Nussaibah Younis, author of FUNDAMENTALLY)

A compulsive, twisty, boundary pushing novel (Harlan Coben, author of THINK TWICE)