A Private Place [Kindle Edition]

It's a shame this is currently out of print because all Craig's novels interlinked, and this is the novel where the Viner family first appear. Set in a progressive co-educational boarding school it's a satire on liberal/ romantic values, as experienced by three pupils. One is the bookish Scottish step-daughter of the Headmaster, Alice. She is persecuted by Grub Viner, an aspiring pianist, and side-kick to the school bully Jono Tore. Arriving to challenge Tore is Winthrop T Sheen, a disgraced American Preppy who succeeds where Tore has failed in seducing Alice. The three of them eventually bring about the collapse of the school. There are echoes of real-life scandals here( such as the closure of Dartington)but what really grips are the descriptions of the power-struggles between pupils, to which the well-meaning staff are blind. A bitingly funny and gripping novel.

This is an extraordinarily well-written, gripping novel, meticulously observed, mordantly witty, savagely angry and yet compassionate, all at one and the same time! It is a briliant dissection of school life and its big and little cruelties as well as its small pleasures. But it's also a compelling drama of love, hatred, the getting of wisdom and the closing-off of some minds. Amanda Craig is in my opinion one of the most brilliant novelists writing in Britain today, and all her books should be in print!

A sometimes hilarious, sometimes very moving account of life in a progressive school. Intellectual Alice, the orphaned sister-in-law of the headmaster, is bullied by her often filthy-rich, rebellious classmates. When 'spoilt-brat' American millionaire's son Winthrop T. Sheen arrives at the school, he to his surprise also gets bullied, and forms an unexpected alliance with Alice. Meanwhile Denis 'Grub' Viner, a gifted pianist and the 'joker' of his year, also finds himself gradually attracted to Alice, at the same time being led by his friend Johnny Tore into bullying both her and Winthrop. Loosely based on the myths of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur and of Ariadne and Dionysus, this is compulsive reading. I particularly liked the way that Craig depicted how friendships and romances form in an enclosed environment like a boarding school, and her portrayals of needy, brilliant, Classics-loving Alice and of Grub, with his passion for music and his gradual understanding that being popular isn't as important as he's always believed. And Winthrop, the over-confident American, was a brilliant creation - both obnoxious and at times oddly sympathetic. I also liked Craig's final explanation of why Johnny Tore was such a bully. The descriptions of day-to-day life in a progressive school had me laughing out loud. And there are plenty of coups-de-theatre in the last section of the book!

I hope Craig brings back Grub and Alice in one of her future novels (they are mentioned in several of her other books, but don't feature much) - I want to find out more about what happened to them after they left the school!