Notes on a Scandal - Softcover

Heller, Zoë

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141039957 ISBN 13: 9780141039954

Publisher: Penguin, 2009

Synopsis

A Hay Festival and The Poole VOTE 100 BOOKS for Women Selection

Shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize, Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal is a darkly compelling novel that explores the taboo subject of pupil/teacher relationships, obsession and betrayal.

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


Zoë 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.

About this title

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:

Fascinating, brilliant, horribly addictive (Guardian)

Outstanding, brilliantly understated and blackly funny (Daily Telegraph)

Brilliant, nasty, gripping (Zadie Smith Observer)

Deliciously sinister (Daily Mail)

Compelling, dark, sexy (Observer)

Deliciously perverse, laugh-out-loud-funny (Vogue)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0141039957
• ISBN 13: 9780141039954
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256