Notes on a Scandal (Penguin Ink) - Softcover

Heller, Zo�

3.73

23,019 ratings by Goodreads

9780241954553: Notes on a Scandal (Penguin Ink)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 024195455X ISBN 13: 9780241954553

Publisher: Penguin, 2011

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We don't have secrets, Sheba and I

From the first day that the beguiling Sheba Hart joins the staff of St George's, history teacher Barbara Covett is convinced that 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 young pupils, Barbara quickly elects herself as Sheba's chief defender. But all is not as at first it seems in this dark story and, as Sheba will soon discover, a friend can be just as treacherous as any lover.

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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:

Fascinating, brilliant, horribly addictive (Guardian)

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

Deliciously sinister (Daily Mail)

Excellent. An undercurrent of subtle malice, cleverly controlled by Heller (Evening Standard)

Brilliant, nasty, gripping (Zadie Smith Observer)

Reads like a nose through someone else's bathroom cabinet: full of guilty insights and delicious snobbery (Independent)

A subtle study in obsession and loneliness ... my take-it-to-the-beach recommendation (Monica Ali Guardian Summer Reading)

The most gripping book I have read so far this year (Independent on Sunday)

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