The Schoolhouse: A novel
From the Booker Prize-longlisted author of Love and Other Thought Experiments comes a masterful and gripping thriller about truth, silence, and the weight of the past.
Isobel lives an isolated life in North London, where she works at a nearby library. She feels safe, so long as she keeps to her routines and doesn’t let her thoughts stray too far into the past. But a newspaper photograph of a missing local schoolgirl and a letter from her old teacher send her spiraling and bring back the trauma of what happened years ago, when she was a pupil at The Schoolhouse.
The Schoolhouse was a 1970s experimental school where the usual rules did not apply. Life there was a dark interplay of freedom and adventure, violence and fear. It was here that Isobel learned that some truths should never be revealed. But try as she might, the truth is coming for Isobel, and everything and everyone she has tried to protect are now at risk.
Isobel lives an isolated life in North London, where she works at a nearby library. She feels safe, so long as she keeps to her routines and doesn’t let her thoughts stray too far into the past. But a newspaper photograph of a missing local schoolgirl and a letter from her old teacher send her spiraling and bring back the trauma of what happened years ago, when she was a pupil at The Schoolhouse.
The Schoolhouse was a 1970s experimental school where the usual rules did not apply. Life there was a dark interplay of freedom and adventure, violence and fear. It was here that Isobel learned that some truths should never be revealed. But try as she might, the truth is coming for Isobel, and everything and everyone she has tried to protect are now at risk.
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Community Reviews
When a book is perfect: I will take no notes. This book is fucking stunning. A diary; a woman and her haunted past and a missing girl. What do they all have in common? Fierce women, absolutely shit-kicked by life and men but instead of vengeance there is life—and maybe a little vengeance in that living. Ugh. I LOVED THE LADY COP, who serves as one of our narrators. She’s fantastic. Adult Isobel is everything, fractured but trying. The children in this book are heartbreaking—failed and failing and thriving and just, UGH. This reminds me of Dirt Creek, another fantastic book about children. All the timelines converge and my heart was ripped open. This books is magnificently crafted. I finished it in one sitting. I could not put it down. The author crafts this fantastic story that protects and exposes us readers, just as Isobel and Carter—Angie and Mary, just stunning. READ. THIS. BOOK.
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