If you no longer want to be you, be careful who you become.

She’s from Southend. She wanted to be an artist and ended up at the best art school in the country. But that didn't work out.

Now she works as a receptionist in an IT firm, where her only creative outlet is arranging the sandwiches she’s ordered in for other people’s meetings. And she still lives in Southend.

Outside work, soulless sex has become a symptom of her boredom.

Then Gustav appears: older, perceptive, attentive. And French.

He’s her way out, she thinks. But more than that, a chance to be creative again: to become someone new.

How to be a French Girl is a fierce, disturbing and funny debut novel about desire, art and what we’ll risk to change ourselves.