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Published Jan 2020
208 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
From the author of The Seed Collectors comes a darkly comic take on power, privilege, and the pressure put on young women to fit in - and be thin - at their all-girls boarding school.
It's already the second week of term when Natasha, the daughter of a Russian oligarch, arrives at a vast English country house for her first day of boarding school. She soon discovers that the headmaster gives special treatment to the skinniest girls, and Natasha finds herself thrown into the school's unfamiliar, moneyed world of fierce pecking orders, eating disorders, and Instagram angst. When her friend Bianca mysteriously vanishes, the world of the school gets ever darker and stranger.
The halls echo with the story of Princess Augusta, the White Lady whose portraits―featuring a hypnotizing black diamond―hang everywhere. She fell in love with a commoner and drowned herself in the lake, and her ghost is said to haunt the dorms. But the girls don't really know anything about the woman she was, much less anything about each other.
Hilariously dark, Oligarchy is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for the digital age. Scarlett Thomas captures the lives of privileged teenage girls seeking to be loved and accepted in all their triviality and magnitude. With the help of her diet-obsessed classmates, Tash must try to stay alive―and sane―while she uncovers what's really going on.
"This is a weird, twisty book, and anyone familiar with Thomas' oeuvre will expect the kind of dark humor that is only possible from a writer of profound compassion. Strong stuff. Another strange delight from one of the United Kingdom's most interesting authors." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Though Thomas's characters get a lot of flak for being insufferable rich girls from outsiders in the novel—and they are—she's captured with an empathetic eye all the brutal, visceral, and surprisingly funny aspects of teenage girlhood. This is a sharp, astute novel." - Publishers Weekly
"Thomas has penned a sharp-eyed novel about the pressure society, adults, and peers put on girls to look and behave a certain way...Thomas deftly explores exactly what those costs are, and the toll they take on young women." - Booklist
"Oligarchy is a delicious slap in the face—stunningly intelligent, alarmingly modern, hilariously funny, deeply pertinent, true, fantastical and several hankies' worth of poignant." – Louisa Young, author of My Dear I Wanted to Tell You
"An intricate black jewel of a novel. Weeks later I'm still thinking about it." – Kirsty Logan, author of Things We Say in the Dark
"The savagery of a private girls' school in England is not to be underestimated and never to be forgotten upon reading Oligarchy, Scarlett Thomas's scathing and brilliantly written novel of wealth and vanity run terribly amok." – Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen
This information about Oligarchy was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Sammie Luck
Scarlett Thomas was born in London. She is the author of highly acclaimed contemporary cult novels including The End of Mr. Y, which was longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, Oligarchy, The Seed Collectors, PopCo, and the Worldquake series of middle grade books. Her novels have sold over half a million copies worldwide, and been translated into twenty-six languages. Scarlett is professor of creative writing and contemporary fiction at the University of Kent. Find out more at ScarThomas.com.
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