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"June of the summer I was 15, my father ran off with some woman he loved more than us." Cadence Sinclair, the teenage narrator of We Were Liars, initially seems very familiar: quirky, perky, sentimental and charming, blessed with an unusual name and a neat turn of phrase, surely she's going to lead us on a tale of unrequited love studded with witty one-liners. And indeed she does, but her story soon descends into much murkier waters, eyeing its teenage protagonist with a twisted smile and a tragic sense of the pain wrought by selfish, self-absorbed adolescents.

The American writer Emily Jenkins writes picture books and for adults under her own name, and YA novels as E Lockhart. I'd only read one of them, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, the tale of a feisty teenage girl at a prestigious boarding school who refuses to play by the rules. It's adorably warm and funny, and I was expecting more of the same, but We Were Liars is quite different: cool, bitter and brutal, this compelling short novel casts a dispassionate eye on the insular world of the American oligarchy.

Cadence is the eldest granddaughter of a family so rich that they never mention money. Every year, the Sinclairs spend their summer on a private island, where the grandparents have built four houses for themselves and their three daughters, plus a smaller building for their cooks and cleaners.

The Sinclairs are beset by deaths, addictions and the tragedies that afflict all families, however privileged, but they tuck them away behind their strong chins and perfect smiles. Raw emotions are hidden by a curtain of politeness. "I don't know what happened," Cadence says of her aunt's divorce. "The family never speaks of it."

Cadence makes a tight little group with the two grandchildren her own age, Johnny and Mirren, and an outsider, Gat, who joins them every year. Aged 15, Cadence falls in love with Gat. At the end of that summer, she has an accident, a breakdown or some kind of illness, but she can't remember what happened, how or why. All she knows is that she was found on the shore, dressed in her underwear, the sea washing over her. "They tested me for brain tumours, meningitis, you name it. To relieve the pain they prescribed this drug and that drug and another drug, because the first one didn't work and the second one didn't work, either."

That was two summers ago. Now she is returning to the island, to her family, her grandfather, aunts and cousins, and Gat. Pills cloud her judgment. Migraines confine her to bed for days. "I lie in my darkened room. Scavenger birds peck at the oozing matter that leaks from my cracked skull."

Cadence narrates the novel, but she doesn't use the polite, restrained style that you'd expect from such an expensively educated aristocrat. The characters are not well-rounded or beautifully drawn; the descriptions are not lush or elegant. The prose is fractured, disordered, messy. This is the voice of a girl who has been broken and is trying to put the pieces back together.

Quizzing those around her, Cadence searches for a solution, an explanation. "I suppose that I was raped or attacked or some godforsaken something. That's the kind of thing that makes people have amnesia, isn't it?" The reader searches with her, combing for clues in the family's behaviour, the lies and omissions of a tight-knit patrician clan. Are we reading a version of Festen? Or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? A family gathering, an island, a secret – what lies behind this gilded facade?

Of course I won't reveal the twists and turns of the cunning plot, but I can say that when the secret at the heart of the book is finally revealed, it turns out to be nastier and more shocking than anything I had imagined. This is a cunning, clever and absolutely gripping novel, full of surprises, which sent me straight back to its first page as soon as I reached the last.

Josh Lacey's The Dragonsitter is published by Andersen. To order We Were Liars for £6.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

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