Thursday, March 19, 2020

Ten top books about boarding school

James Scudamore is the author of the novels English Monsters, Wreaking, Heliopolis and The Amnesia Clinic. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award and been nominated for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Man Booker Prize.

At the Guardian he tagged ten top books about boarding school, including:
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

At 14, Lee Fiora becomes fascinated with boarding schools while researching the subject at her local public library. She falls for the handsome boys in the prospectuses she sends away for and ends up, to the mystification of her parents, on a scholarship to the prestigious Ault school in Massachusetts. The environment here is as preppy as it gets – the characters have names such as Cross Sugarman and Gates Medkowski – but the stew of adolescent fears and desires the novel depicts is universal.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Prep is among Caroline Zancan's eight stories about what really happens on campus, Lucy Worsley's six best books, and James Browning's ten best boarding school books.

--Marshal Zeringue