Random House is making a big investment in a 25-year-old debut novelist, Emma Cline.

Ms. Cline’s debut novel, “The Girls,” which takes place in a hippie commune in 1969, set off a heated bidding war among 12 publishers. It sold to Random House as part of a three-book deal for a rumored seven figures, according to Publishers Weekly. The producer Scott Rudin bought the film rights before the book even went to auction.

“Random House is very bullish about the book and her future and her place in the literary landscape,” said Bill Clegg, Ms. Cline’s literary agent, who declined to confirm the amount of the advance. “She’s arriving fully hatched as a significant thinker and literary conjurer.”

Ms. Cline, who has an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University, has published short fiction in the Paris Review and Tin House, and won the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction this year. She works as a reader in The New Yorker’s fiction department.

“The Girls” centers on a bored, lonely 14-year-old girl named Evie who is befriended by an older girl and drawn into a volatile, cultlike commune in Marin County that’s run by a charismatic, unstable leader.

Kate Medina, the executive editorial director of Random House, said that she was struck by the power of Ms. Cline’s writing and the depth of her psychological insights.

“We fell in love with the way she writes,” she said. “It’s a universal story of a girl coming of age in jeopardy.”

The novel has become one of the buzziest titles at the Frankfurt book fair for international publishers this week, and has already sold in Holland, England, Brazil, Poland and Italy. “We have auctions going everywhere,” Mr. Clegg said.