Notes on a Scandal - Softcover

Heller, Zo�

3.73

23,023 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141029064 ISBN 13: 9780141029061

Publisher: Penguin, 2007

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Film tie-in edition of Zo� Heller's darkly compelling Booker shortlisted novel. The film of Notes on a Scandal received four Oscar nominations and stars Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench.

From the first day that the beguiling Sheba Hart joins the staff of St George's history teacher Barbara Covett is convinced she has found a kindred spirit. Barbara's loyalty to her new friend is passionate and unstinting and when Sheba is discovered having an illicit affair with one of her pupils, Barbara quickly elects herself as Sheba's chief defender. But all is not as it first seems in this dark story and, as Sheba will soon discover, a friend can be just as treacherous as any lover.

'Brilliant, nasty, gripping' Zadie Smith

'Compelling, dark, sexy' Observer

'Superbly gripping. One of the most compelling books I've read in ages' Daily Telegraph

'Deliciously sinister' Daily Mail

Zo� Heller is the author of three novels, Everything You Know, Notes on a Scandal, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003 and The Believers. The 2006 film adaptation of Notes on a Scandal, starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, received four Oscar nominations. She lives in New York.

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Review:

Zoe Heller juggles journalism and novel-writing successfully in Notes on a Scandal and manages to say something interesting and complex about moral panics and the people who get caught up in them.

Pottery teacher Sheba lets herself be talked into an affair with 15-year-old pupil Connolly; part of what is admirable about this novel is that there is no real attempt to extenuate this--it's wrong and she knows this from the start, enough to lie to herself and others about it. It's an abuse of her very limited power--he is one of the few of her pupils interested in art, not interested in perpetually disrupting her lessons.

Sheba is not alone in abusing power, though, and Heller forces us to confront this unpleasant truth about the moralising, managerial headmaster, the husband freed by Sheba's action to seduce his own very slightly older students, and the relatives who never liked her much and can now disown her. Above all, she devotes most of the novel to Barbara, the older colleague who becomes Sheba's confidante and slowly manipulates the situation to make Sheba entirely dependent on her. This is a brilliantly gloomy study in obsession--and the obsession in question is not actually Sheba's with her underage lover. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

"An intense, witty, literary page-turner"--"Entertainment Weekly" "Equally adroit at satire and at psychological suspense, Zoe Heller charts the course of a predatory friendship and demonstrates the lengths to which some people go for human company."--"The New Yorker" "A deliciously perverse, laugh-out-loud-funny novel."--"Vogue" "A triumph of intelligence and narrative control."--"The Times" (London) "Heller is a great ventriloquist of character, and as the unhinged curator of the Sheba affair, Barbara is painfully note perfect."--"The Washington Post Book World" "Wicked and wonderful social satire."--"Glamour"

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