The Gilded Butterfly Effect by Heather Colley

The Gilded Butterfly Effect by Heather Colley

Fans of Mona Awad’s Bunny and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation rejoice—your newest “weird girl” antiheroes are finally here in this unflinching feminist campus novel.​

When introverted loner Penny transfers to a Midwest university in search of the all-American college experience, she finds herself under the intoxicating influence of Stella, a glamorous, damaged sorority girl with a razor-sharp wit and a bottle full of secrets. As their unlikely friendship deepens into obsession, both young women spiral into a hall of mirrors—haunted by frat-house cruelties and the brutal expectations of modern femininity.​

“A powerful exploration of what it means to survive, and transform, in the gilded cage of modern campus life.” —BookTrib​

“Think Mean Girls on uppers. By turns savage and sympathetic, Heather Colley’s The Gilded Butterfly Effect skewers the absurd theatre of college life with ferocious wit and style.” —Damian Fowler, author of Falling Through Clouds

“The Gilded Butterfly Effect spreads like a stain, dark and irrevocable, as the characters chase the edges of their own destructionAt once jarring and hypnotic, bitter and full of desperate hope, the voices of its two narrators entwine and pull each other to pieces. Heather Colley has invented a new rhythm of language, or perhaps pulled one out of the depths of consciousness. A singular and unforgettable debut.” —Devon Halliday, author, To Stay, To Stay, To Stay

Heather Colley is a PhD student in English Literature at the University of Oxford (Regents Park College). She researches late 19th and early 20th century jazz and blues aesthetics in transatlantic modernist literature, with a particular emphasis on the impacts of musical forms and tropes on literary experimentation and cultural development. She completed her Master’s in Modern and Contemporary Literature with Distinction at St Andrews, where she studied lyric and form in the work of mid-twentieth century African American women novelists. She received her Bachelor’s in English Literature/Creative Writing and Sociology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Heather Colley’s writing won The Oxford Review of Books Short Fiction Prize, the Hopwood Award, and the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize Shortlist. The Gilded Butterfly Effect is her debut novel. She lives in Oxford, England and New York.