A love-drunk Shakespeare enthusiast and a disillusioned Instagram baker try to kill each other at a wedding. They're supposed to be best friends so how did they end up here?

Part 10 Things I Hate About You, part My Brilliant Friend, part Lena Dunham's Girls, Dream Girls explores female friendships and asks whether they're the greatest comedies, tragedies and, above all, love stories of our lives.

Helena and Ruthie have been best friends since high school, where they bonded over Wuthering Heights, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and photographs of Joseph Stalin when he was young and hot. They dreamed of getting a place of their own in the city and living a life of great passion, art and romance. But as they drift into their late twenties, they are forced to contend with the idea that growing up might mean growing apart.

Helena works at an elite boys' private school -- a misogynistic hellhole rife with sexual harassment and paintings of ships. Every day she pines for an ex-boyfriend who left her with nothing but a print of an artwork of Ophelia drowning. Meanwhile, Ruthie is pouring her marital despair into three-tiered funfetti cakes and seeking refuge from her family in solo Friday night trips to Woolworths.

When an old school friend invites Helena and Ruthie to a glamorous forest wedding, they jump at the chance to reconnect. But finding their way back to each other, past unrealised dreams and younger selves, isn't as easy as they thought. Inspired by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Dream Girls is a novel about love and friendship in absurd times.

‘A compelling and deep exploration of intense female friendship. Goldstein writes with intelligence and verve, and with a forensically nuanced understanding of the sometimes-thin line between resentment and love.’ MADELEINE GRAY

‘Dream Girls completely charmed me . . . How wonderful to read a novel that is unapologetically for and about women and the fierceness of our friendships.’ EMMA DARRAGH

‘The broken and (almost) unbearably flawed characters are like the perfect antidote to the slick young twenty-somethings of Sally Rooney. . . Shakespeare and Taylor Swift provide a perfect framework.’ JACLYN MORIARTY