Overheads - Hardcover

Oakley, Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002257912 ISBN 13: 9780002257916

Publisher: Flamingo, 1999

Synopsis

A black, bleak comedy of contemporary campus chaos.

Acronyms, committees and statistics abound at the University of East Midlands, a vast net to entrap the unwary ambitions of its hapless academics, who are forced to run the gauntlet of budgetary pressures and even management consultants under the sinister and manipulative eye of EMU’s V-C Sir Stanley Oxborrow before they can even begin the business of research and teaching. Sexual predators and lounge lizards are the least of the worries that afflict Professor Lydia Malinder and her colleagues; in the university of today they have to justify their existence on a daily basis.

Ann Oakley’s new novel is a lightly handled but nevertheless intense debunking of the horrors of contemporary university life, and one that, in these days of ‘education, education, education’, would be eminently publicisable.

About this title

Review:

‘Bleakly funny’
Marie Claire

‘Witty and worringly recognisable’
Good Housekeeping

‘Sly, academic comedy of campus life’
Harpers & Queen

From the Back Cover:

Acronyms, committees and statistics abound at the University of East Midlands, a vast net to entrap the unwary ambitions of its hapless academics, who are forced to run the gauntlet of budgetary pressures and even management consultants under the sinister and manipulative eye of EMU’s V-C Sir Stanley Oxborrow before they can even begin the business of research and teaching. Sexual predators and lounge lizards are the least of the worries that afflict Professor Lydia Malinder and her colleagues; in the university of today they have to justify their existence on a daily basis.

Lydia has other problems, too. Should she allow her feelings for her lover, the sexy but ambitious – and married- Professor Krest, to stand in the way of her career? I s going to bed with the fresh young management consultant likely to compromise her fight to retain the funding of her department? Can it really be possible that a supremely rational, intelligent and successful academic could begin to believe that she is being stalked – by a panther?

'Overheads 'is a lightly handled but nevertheless intense debunking of the horrors of contemporary university life and a wryly amusing look at the variety of pressures that afflict the women and men within it.

About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0002257912
• ISBN 13: 9780002257916
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280