‘The French Gift’ could be the unpublished manuscript of a crime novel or the bond of friendship between two unlikely women, one a French Resistance fighter and the other, a murderer. Historical fiction at its best by Kirsty Manning.Alice Pung highlights the travails of a pregnant teenager looking for agency and independence in her life against the backdrop of a cultural divide, a controlling parent and her own divided sense of self in her latest novel, ‘One Hundred Days’.