A sharp, searing campus novel with an unforgettable female friendship at its heart, and a love letter to the messy, glorious years at the start of your twenties, when nothing and everything feels possible all at once.

When Esmé Polignac meets Charlotte Cap on the first day of their freshman year at Montrose, she can see the girl is in over her head. Esmé’s entire life had shaped her into the kind of person who belongs in an elite university like Montrose, and it was clear Charlotte’s life had not.

Esmé is everything Charlotte wants to be: enigmatic, cool, and utterly unperturbable, never allowing anyone—particularly any boys—to have any control over her. At the same time, Charlotte’s naiveté reminds Esmé of an innocence she wishes she still had, and she feels the urge to tuck Charlotte under her wing. Despite their differences, the two young women become inseparable as they make their first forays into adulthood, navigating broken families, toxic relationships, demanding coursework, and love triangles, all against the backdrop of smoke-filled nights and claustrophobic classrooms on the foggy Scottish coast.

But their charmed lives begin to crumble as Charlotte’s romantic streak turns destructive, as Esmé both betrays and is betrayed, as their futures wither on the vine when a global recession sets in, and as their friendship group realizes that sometimes, playing games can have tragic consequences. . . .

Broken Toys is a bitingly observant, propulsive coming-of-age story of sex, class, love and friendship; of hedonism fueled by privilege and the mistakes we make when we’re young, of that time in our lives when we are on the precipice of everything we’ve ever wanted and simultaneously feel it slipping through our fingers.