Eliza Clark is a genius with voice and a master of flipped expectations. Penance astonished me with its breadth, wit and confidence. A wickedly clever deep dive into the nastier corners of the national psyche - you've never read anything like this. -- Julia Armfield

As bleak as it is compelling, Penance is a perfect dark satire of the voyeuristic true crime industry and the media's complicity in sensationalising the pointless destruction of human lives into a vulgar, grubby money-making circus. -- Charlotte Vassell

Fans of Joseph Knox's True Crime Story and Megan Abbott's teen noirs will love Clark's meta-meditation on the mysteries, malice, and minutiae of adolescence. -- Tom Benn

I loved Boy Parts but this was another creature entirely. Coolly detached, stricter, cleaner, and still insanely propulsive. Vivid, excellent dialogue, at times heartbreaking. She's a master of structure that Clark. -- Jenny Mustard

Boy Parts was always going to be a tough act to follow, and Penance rises to the challenge - and engulfs it in flames. An unmissable banger that you need to preorder immediately. -- Alice Slater

I was left thoroughly gaslit by Penance, a dizzying exploration of the ethics of true crime. In a novel that manages to be both deeply disturbing and hilarious, Clark nails teenage pain and posturing, as well as the seductive moral vacuum of the online world. -- Imogen Crimp

One of the summer's most talked-about books. - Sunday Times, hottest new novels for summer 2023

Chilling, clever and unputdownable. - Guardian

[N]ever reads like a conventional novel . . . Penance is written with such intelligence and dark humour . . . what Clark does best, though, is capture what it's like being a teenager today. - Telegraph

Intricate . . . the skin-prickling result is a pitch-dark mosaic of murky families and deadly frenemies, chronicling the slow decline of an ill-omened holiday resort with supernatural chills and metafictional twists. - Observer

A work of show-stopping formal mastery and penetrating intelligence. - Guardian

A mystery that pulled me back into the muddy rage of girlhood. -- Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Gripping. -- Sheena Patel