The Paper Girls

In a world where girls are no longer born naturally, they are raised in schools, trained in the arts of pleasing men until they are prepared for the outside world. When they complete their training, the girls with the highest scores become “companions,” permitted to live with a husband and bear boys until they are no longer useful.

For the girls left behind, the future—as a concubine or a virgin—is bleak.

Best friends Freida and Isabel are certain they will be chosen as companions, especially since they are among the best and highest-rated. But as the intensity of their final year begins to mount, Isabel does the unthinkable and stops caring about her appearance until she becomes... fat.

It is in this enclosed, tense, and competitive female environment that the boys arrive, eager to choose a bride. And Freida must fight for her future, even if it means betraying her only friend, the only love she has ever known.

In compulsive, biting prose, Louise O’Neill offers a critique of modern society, where beauty has become an obsession and girls are sexualized and judged on their physical appearance from a very young age.