Megan Abbott’s top 10 novels of teenage friendship

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From Charles Dickens to Donna Tartt, the novelist chooses the best depictions of the angst-ridden alliances formed as adult life begins.

“Novels of adolescence are heavily weighted towards tales of the “friendless” – loners, malcontents, social outcasts in the Holden Caulfield tradition. It is, after all, an age of peer horrors and humiliation and a fixation on romantic or sexual connections rather than platonic ones. Friendships, when illuminated, tend to be characterised by rivalry, betrayal and the complicated nodes of identification and desire.

“Teenage stories tend to chart the harrowing passage to adulthood where no relationship is ever so uncomplicated again. In my novel, The End of Everything, 13-year-old Lizzie’s best friend Evie disappears just at that noisy hinge between childhood and adolescent tumult. Lizzie still believes, bone-deep, she knows Evie as she knows herself. But, as it turns out, she knows neither, and the revelations that follow thrust her into a painfully adult awareness.

“Given such a tortured terrain, it’s no surprise this is a list, in no particular order, dominated by the most exquisite of teen emotions: angst.”

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