The Heritage

When fifteen-year-old Tilly is wrongly sent to a Young Offenders Institute - a far cry from her safe, suburban upbringing - she's desperately bored and unhappy until she meets Sadie. Now released and living in Sadie's bedsit, the pair soon throw themselves into a contented life of petty criminality. But when sinister landlady and social worker Lynda comes to take DNA swabs - purportedly for a scientific investigation into the genetic roots of criminal behavior - their teenage idyll is shattered. For a joke, Tilly swaps the two girls' samples, setting into motion a gripping story of mistaken identity and corporate malice. With its depiction of shoplifting techniques, shadowy revolutionaries, alcopops, sperm banks, genetics, adolescense and a lot of smoking, "The Heritage" is both funny and sad, grittily real yet exuberantly imagined, utterly strange and yet strangely moving.


Genre: Literary Fiction