Before I opened Chloe Michelle Howarth’s Sunburn to review it, a friend had already recommended it to me as “Normal People for lesbians.” I can’t say I agree with the comparison. Although both novels are excruciating, star-crossed romances set in Ireland, Sunburn, with its girlish cast of characters, feels more like a bleakly erotic “Derry Girls.”

It’s June 1989 when we meet teenage Lucy and her circle of childhood friends in the has-been town of Crossmore. With the long, featureless summer ahead of her and nothing to do, she’s staring down the barrel of the rest of her life. The girls have become aware of the boys, the boys are making passes at the girls, and Lucy “gossip[s] and slack[s] off and leave[s her] choices to the democracy of the girls.”

At home, Lucy is equally passive, in thrall to her mother and acting the part of her Mini Me. She waits patiently for the day she’ll fall for Martin — her longtime best friend and, according to everyone, the boy she’s bound to end up with. It is to Lucy’s great shame that she instead finds her attention increasingly drawn to Susannah, one of the other girls.

Susannah is, in Lucy’s opinion, far cooler and more evolved than their peers. In truth, she’s profoundly lonely. Susannah initiates a series of private meetings, separate from the others — meandering, smoky, sun-soaked days on the front lawn of her Grey Gardens-esque family home. Too sun-struck to speak of their developing attraction, they begin exchanging letters. Thinks Lucy:

“It’s so silly that we have become pen pals when we spend all day together. There isn’t much I can report in my letters, except for the things that happen in my head, where another version of her has taken residency.”

It is a premise so classically sapphic, I can’t help but think of Vita and Virginia, of Jeanette Winterson, of Sappho herself. On the other hand, it strikes chords of universal appeal: first love, coming-of-age, the clash of tradition and progress. We follow Lucy from the beginning of her teens to her early 20s, and though it’s rarely mentioned, the shadow of the Troubles looms over their little town. Susannah’s mother is wealthy and Protestant, thus the natural subject of gossip in Lucy’s Catholic household, where politics is a sore subject.

Amid Lucy’s stiflingly silent, love-starved family and Susannah’s neglected home, the pair stoke a relationship that burns bright enough to warm them through their final years of school. Torn between her mother’s fair-weather affection and Susannah’s half-baked dreams of escape, Lucy is confronted with her own desperation and hates herself as she makes the coward’s choice again and again.

I struggle to critique this novel. I’m partial to emotional hard-hitters, and this one put me through the wringer. It’s full of gorgeous, searing prose, poignant characters, and a plot that emerges as naturally as if ripped out of one’s own diary. I’m most impressed by its interiority — the masterful depiction of a teen’s desperate hunger for love and her imperfect path to finding herself. The implications of Lucy’s desire are clear, but this is not a book about suffering. It’s a love story.

I’ve devoured this novel twice now — when it first came out in 2023 and then again in its American reprint. It’s late summer, my shoulders are peeling, and I’m pressing flowers between the pages of my copy. In the flyleaves of this sometimes-epistolary novel, I’ve written a letter of my own. Such is the sickness inspired by Sunburn — its fevered yearning, its claustrophobic quarters, its lurid fixations that sometimes veer into the grotesque. I’m of the opinion that good writing should activate both the body and the soul, and for such a burner of a book, this one’s quite the salve, too. To quote Lucy:

“I wonder if she knows what a cure she is.”

Madeleine de Visé is a bookseller in Baltimore, MD.