Keiko steps on to a New York airstrip in March 1952, turning one horribly scarred cheek away from the pop and flare of the news photographers' cameras. An eighteen-year-old survivor of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and killed the people she loved, Keiko has been chosen from hundreds to be the first Hiroshima Maiden, liberal America's new poster girl, brought to the States to receive sponsored treatment for her radiation scars.

Radiance is a mesmerising novel about guilt and intimacy set against the backdrop of an America both appalled and entranced by its own destructive power.

Check out an extract from Radiance taken from newbooks issue 44.