What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal - Hardcover

Heller, Zoe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805073337 ISBN 13: 9780805073331

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 2003

Synopsis

When her best friend Sheba Hart's love affair with an underage male student comes to light, igniting a media circus, solitary schoolteacher Barbara Covett decides to write an account of the affair in her friend's defense, in the process revealing not only Sheba's secrets, but also her own. By the author of Everything You Know. 35,000 first printing.

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)

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)

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0805073337
• ISBN 13: 9780805073331
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 258