Cass Moriarty is in-conversation with Anne Casey-Hardy discussing Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls.

Excitable girls rush out to meet life; what could go wrong? A masterful debut about the terrifying thrills of innocence from a voice of experience.

Teenagers sneak out to the creek for a wild New Year's Eve party. A sleep-deprived woman who imagines she is pregnant to a Viking faces her scathing sixteen-year-old self. A woman in love wakes up in a van Gogh painting.

These gem-like stories are about the desire to rush out and meet life; about getting in over your head; about danger, and damage, and what it means to survive – and not always survive – the risk of being young. They chart the borderlands between girls and women, daughters and mothers, freedom and fear.