Born in a small town in the desolate reaches of western Texas and shaped by her girlhood in an industrial wasteland on the outskirts of Dallas, Bonnie Parker was a natural performer and a star student. She dreamed of being a movie star or a singer or a poet. But her dramatic nature, contorted by her limited opportunities and her overwhelming love for Clyde Barrow, pushed her into a course from which there was no escape but death. Christina Schwarz's novel follows Bonnie from her bright, promising youth to her final month of shoot-outs, kidnappings and desperate car chases through America’s hinterland in the grip of the Great Depression, as the noose of the law tightened around her.

Trudy has been raised to marry her childhood friend and assume a life of bourgeois comfort in Milwaukee. She knows she should be pleased, but is restless instead, yearning for something she lacks even the vocabulary to articulate. When she falls in love with enigmatic and ambitious Oskar, she believes she has found her escape from the banality of her preordained life. But escape turns out to be more fraught than Trudy had imagined.