Lily King

Euphoria fictionalises a few months in 1933 when Margaret Mead, her husband and Gregory Bateson were doing fieldwork on the Sepik River, and turns anthropology into a triangle of ambition and attraction.

Writers and Lovers is smaller and better: a waitress in Boston, thirty-one, grieving her mother and six years into a novel nobody has asked for. King is very good on money anxiety, which literary fiction usually skips, and on the specific humiliation of being asked how the writing is going.