“When I step away,” says Kiara, of her latest, hopeless attempt to find herself a job, as a shop assistant, “I make sure to make a fist and pound lightly on the glass display counter. Not hard enough to risk breaking it, but enough that the twentysomethings look over at me with fear in their eyes before I swing out the door and back on to the street.”
Kiara is the sparky 17-year-old protagonist of a debut novel by Leila Mottley, who is just two years older and looks set to face no such problems. With days to go to publication, Nightcrawling is already accumulating fans among writers such as Dave Eggers and Ruth Ozeki with its portrait of hard-scrabble life in the California city of Oakland.
