"It might sound like a potentially familiar narrative: a queer coming-of-age story, charted across one single heat-crazed summer in the 70s. From its very first paragraphs, however, this debut novel feels different. Madeleine Dunnigan immediately takes us inside the head of her rather scary protagonist, and makes his adventures in teenage lust and self-awareness as involving as they are immediate. The writing is constantly surprising, as unafraid of sensuality as it is of the story's repeated eruptions of brutality."
"We first meet Jean, our eponymous hero, as he is about to take his O-levels. He is sitting them at the unusually late age of 17; later, we will find out that this is because he has a history of violence, and has been excluded from every school he's ever attended. To the despair of his teachers, Jean seems completely unable to learn."
Jean is a 17-year-old Jewish scholarship student with a history of violence who has been excluded from every previous school. He sits for his O-levels while living at an isolated, all-male Sussex boarding school nicknamed the House of Nutters, where bohemian liberty mixes with old-school protocol. The school functions as a microcosm for dangerous experiments in masculinity, sexuality, and power among privileged peers. The summer of 1976 provides a charged backdrop that amplifies personal and political tensions. The narrative balances sensual, immediate scenes with recurrent eruptions of brutality and social exclusion.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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