Tara Jones

Tara is one half of a young couple navigating school life together, known at her sixth form as an out lesbian long before it was easy or safe to be. She's sharp-tongued, protective of her privacy, and increasingly uneasy about being treated as a symbol rather than a person with her own messy feelings.

Brown plays the friction between visibility and vulnerability with real precision — Tara's confidence at school masks a private tenderness she rarely lets show. The writing resists making her a lesson in queer representation; instead she gets to be prickly, funny, and scared in equal measure, which is rarer and better.'