Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

We'll laugh because we can, until the sun disintegrates and nighttime threatens to set us free just to capture us again, back into the things we can't escape. 

Kiara does not know what it is to live as a normal seventeen-year-old. With her mother in a halfway house, she fends for herself - and for nine-year-old Trevor, whose own mother disappears for days at a time.

But as the pressures of rent to pay and mouths to feed increase, Kiara finds herself walking the streets after dark, determined to survive in a world that refuses to protect her. 

Nightcrawling is an unforgettable novel about young people navigating the darkest corners of an adult world, told with a humanity that is at once agonising and utterly mesmerising. 

'UNFORGETTABLE' GUARDIAN