Pictures of Lily

Matthew Yorke

The voice of 17-year-old Lily is realistic and engaging. She's experimented with drugs, been in and out of mental hospital, and now she's decided to try to find her birth parents to discover why she was adopted. At times a dark, painful story, and it may grate with some as it tries very hard to be cool, but the suspense and unravelling of Lily's life, as well as her realistic characterisation, made it a compelling and moving read.

Extract

I had taken some 'shrooms that Ben had given me and I was thinking how poor they were compared with Drew's ayahuasca - all I had was a fizzing on my forehead and a bit of a high, floaty feeling - when suddenly I started to see shapes again. This time they were like falling autumn leaves: no matter where I looked shapes were fluttering to the ground. And once again it was as if thoughts were being posted into my brain: now I was convinced that these shapes weren't an hallucination, that they were there all the time, existing in a world of their own, and it was just the drug which had pulled the curtains so that I could see them.

Parallels