An evocative and sharply impressive debut about family secrets and female identity by talented young novelist Rose Ruane

'This Is Yesterday is a song for the outsiders, a hymn to the suburban misfits. Here the tensions and oddness of lower-middle class family life are explored in poetic detail . . . A voice of hope for those who boldly follow their own creative path from adolescence to middle age' Benjamin Myers, author of The Offing

Peach is alone and adrift in London's sprawl, with a stalled art career and an unhappiness she knows won't be cured by a boyfriend or baby. Then she gets a shocking phone call that brings her face to face with her fractured family, and sends her spiralling into her past, to a scorched summer years ago in 90s suburbia . . .

Back in 1994, Peach longs to flee the stifling nowhere that makes her a misfit. Hot listless days and sleepless drunken nights have awakened in her a latent, destructive curiosity; she haunts airless attics, unlocks sealed doors, pries into private affairs and finally unearths a secret that rips her family apart, disrupting everything and setting the course for the rest of her life.

Now, facing this new crisis, Peach and her sister set out to confront a past they have avoided for two decades and meet a future they have no idea how to navigate. This is Yesterday is a book about beginnings and endings, about adolescence and ageing, failures, families, love and loneliness. It is the story of how the girls we once were shape the women we become.

Sex and desire are complicated, and Ruane captures the how and why of that perfectly . . . Ruane's Peach is someone you'll want to shake and cuddle, sometimes simultaneously, for This is Yesterday conveys the messiness of real life - as well as its poignancy