Amy Twigg’s striking debut offers a new twist on the cult narrative. Rather than focusing on a charismatic male leader, Spoilt Creatures (the title comes from a letter Vita Sackville-West wrote to Virginia Woolf) is about one woman’s sway over a feminist commune buried in the Kent countryside.
It’s 2008. Iris is 32 years old, adrift, her life depressingly “dependable and ordinary”. After her relationship with Nathan runs its course, she returns to her childhood home, moves in with her widowed mother and finds a dead-end job in an off-licence.
