Students from an elite girls’ school go on a camping trip into the Australian bush. Four of them – a girl gang, a group of best friends dubbed ‘The Cins’ by the teachers – become separated from the main group. A male teacher volunteers to look for them.

None of the five come back.

A major search immediately gets underway. Days crawl past, agonisingly, with no sign of the girls or their teacher. The principal of the school, godmother to one of the missing students, is desperately trying to hold the parents, the school community – and herself – together. She needs to find out what happened before the police do. Finally, separated and traumatised, the four girls re-appear. But the male teacher does not.

And The Cins aren’t talking.

Wing is an immersive, propulsive, headlong, heartrush of a read. Provocative, sharp, raging and tender, it is a novel about the fault lines in female friendships. Between mothers and daughters. Between older and younger generations. And of course, between men and women. It is a novel that meets its times head on, with great power, honesty and urgency. As the author of the international sensation, The Bride Stripped Bare, Nikki Gemmell defined sex, desire and identity for a generation of women. Now, two decades later, she comes full circle, with another incendiary novel about what it means to be a woman today.