Set in 2011, Crux is a story of intense friendship between two Californian teenagers, bookish Dan and his near-feral best friend Tamma, a lesbian from the wrong side of the tracks and grit, two-down-and-out teens escape the hopelessness of their lives and chase a different future through rock-climbing- from Gabriel Tallent, the New York Times bestselling author of My Absolute Darling.

Dan and Tamma are two teenagers in their last year of high school in the southern Mojave Desert, are passionate climbers, one is a gifted golden child, the other a mouthy burnout, who spend their evenings and weekends conquering small craggy rock formations out in the creosote and smoke-tree desert.  Climbing boulders in trash-strewn parking lots during cold desert nights, they seal their unique bond and dream of a life of adventure.

As the year progresses and adult reality looms, they are rocked by change and pulled apart by irreconcilable obligations. Differences of class, talent and prospects take on new importance; options dwindle, and their decisions grow ever more consequential and perilous. It feels inevitable, finally, that something must give. With a magnificent gift for nature writing and a joyful appreciation for the redemptive power of friendship, Gabriel Tallent gives readers a rollicking, adrenaline-filled, and soul-searching novel about risk everything to change your life.

At 17, Dan finesses his college application, Tamma looks to a life on the open road and vertiginous rocks.

Dan’s mother Alexandra and Tamma’s mother, Kendra, were inseparable. Alexandra a successful novelist (“the Mojave-born Hemingway”) Kendra was left working in the local diner. Years later, class cracks have opened up. “Your folks were readers, and hers were not”, Dan realises. Tamma llived in a trailer, and you in a handmade little house”. History is to repeat itself. In climbing terms, a crux is the point on a rock face where a climber can succeed or fail. But, Tallent notes, they also appear in life. The jagged, uncompromising landscape of the Pacific Northwest, with its trails of scrub oak, decaying palisades and vast “whiskey-gold horizon”, is well detailed.

Fiction about climbing tends to focus on tough tales of men in tight spots, but Tallent’s story is shaped by the situations of women: Alexandra’s disappointment at her stalled writing career and failing health; Kendra’s bitterness over her own choices; Tamma’s conflicting responsibilities. Dan attempts to understand these sometimes strong, sometimes weak, mothers and daughters.

Dan and Tamma share something guileless in their characters, that innocence, engaging the readers emotionally. When Dan arrives at their high school prom wearing his father’s  suit, she remarks “You look ready to dip your hand in cocaine and fist Fleetwood Mac”.

Crux by Gabriel Tallent, Fig Tree £18.99/ Riverhead $30, 416 pages