As an 11-year-old, Luna Lewis is followed into a bathroom in Italy and forcibly kissed on the mouth by an old man. Later, in Malta, her cousin Daniel picks up her arm. “Fat” is his appraisal: “You eat too much pizza.”
For Luna, an awareness of physical appearance that begins in girlhood metastasises into an obsession with her own beauty – the lingua franca of the female characters in Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s latest work of fiction, West Girls.
