Fleeing Scotland in the wake of family disgrace, 16-year-old Ida Campbell secures a scholarship at a failing girls’ boarding school on a remote part of the south English coast. Despite the eccentricities of her new Headmistress, who warns her of the dangers of the Cold War and the ever-present threat of the bomb, St Anne’s seems like a refuge to Ida. But all this is about to change. For a start, her new room-mate is the infamous Louise Adler, potential arsonist and hardened outcast.

Meanwhile, the geography teacher Eleanor Alston, in her late thirties, a disastrous love affair in her wake, faces the new term with weary resignation. But the fragile ecosystem of the school is disrupted by the arrival of a new teacher, Matthew Langfield. Eleanor has an uneasy feeling he is not who he says he is.

And things only get worse when a mysterious sickness starts to spread throughout the school, causing strange limb jerks and seizures among the pupils. What is happening to the girls of St Anne’s? Could there be a poisoner among them? Is Ida’s scholarship really an escape, or is it instead a new nightmare?

Praise for Rebecca Wait:

‘IT’LL EASILY BE ONE OF MY BOOKS OF THE YEAR’ Hannah Beckerman
‘It’s a warm book and a touching one. And did I mention it’s funny? Just read it. You’ll see’ The Times
‘Funny, tender and sad’ Sunday Express
‘If you liked Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss, you’ll love this novel’ Good Housekeeping
‘One of the richest explorations of family dysfunction I’ve read’ i newspaper
‘Shades of Fleabag in this smart, funny drama’ Mail on Sunday
‘An enjoyably bittersweet novel about a dysfunctional modern family’ Independent
‘Razor-sharp ‘ Observer
‘One of the funniest novels you’ll read this year’ Guardian

‘It’s a warm book and a touching one. And did I mention it’s funny? Just read it. You’ll see’ The Times

‘Funny, tender and sad’ Sunday Express

‘If you liked Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss, you’ll love this novel’ Good Housekeeping

‘One of the richest explorations of family dysfunction I’ve read’ the i newspaper

‘Shades of Fleabag in this smart, funny drama’ Mail on Sunday

‘An enjoyably bittersweet novel about a dysfunctional modern family’ Independent

‘Razor-sharp ‘ Observer

‘One of the funniest novels you’ll read this year’ Guardian

THE BOOK THAT YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO PUT DOWN

For Alice and Hanna, saint and sinner, growing up is a trial. There is their mother, who takes a divide-and-conquer approach to child-rearing, and their father, who takes an absent one. There is also their older brother Michael, whose disapproval is a force to be reckoned with.

There is the catastrophe that is never spoken of, but which has shaped everything . . .

As adults, Alice and Hanna must deal with disappointments in work and in love as well as increasingly complicated family tensions, and lives that look dismayingly dissimilar to what they’d intended. They must look for a way to repair their own fractured relationship, and they must finally choose their own approach to their dominant mother: submit or burn the house down. And they must decide at last whether life is really anything more than (as Hanna would have it) a tragedy with a few hilarious moments.

From the author of the Waterstones Book of the Month Our Fathers comes a compelling domestic comedy about complex family dynamics, mental health and the intricacies of sibling relationships.

WHAT READERS ARE SAYING
5* ‘I adored this book’
5* ‘A brilliant novel about a dysfunctional family’
5* ‘This book blew me away’
5* ‘Loved, loved, loved this! Laugh-out-loud funny and beautifully poignant’
5* ‘The best book i’ve read this year’

What kind of man kills his own family?

‘This is a beautifully realised novel, touching on the fallibility of memory and the unknowability of families, and gripping in its intensity. Outstanding’ Mail on Sunday

‘A spectacular novel’ Spectator

When Tom was eight years old, his father took a shotgun and shot his family: his wife, his son and baby daughter, before turning the gun on himself. Only Tom survived.

He left his tiny, shocked community on the island of Litta and the strained silence of his Uncle Malcolm’s house while still a young boy. For twenty years he’s tried to escape his past. Until now.

Without knowing how to ask, he needs answers – from his uncle, who should have known. From his neighbours, who think his father a decent man who ‘just snapped’. From the memories that haunt the wild landscape of the Hebrides.

And from the silent ones who know more about what happened – and why – than they have ever dared admit.

By turns gripping, beautiful, devastating and tender, Our Fathers is a story about violence and redemption, control and love. With understated compassion and humour, Rebecca Wait gives a voice to the silenced and to the silences between men of few words.