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A Novel
by Madeleine Dunnigan
Set over one hot summer, a startlingly assured debut about the kinds of love that break us and make us whole.
Seventeen-year-old Jean, a troubled Jewish boy caught in the countercultural swirl of 1970s London, arrives at Compton Manor, a rural alternative boarding school for boys with "problems." Dyslexic, antisocial, and prone to violent outbursts, Jean has never made friends easily and school has never been a place of safety or enjoyment.
Compton Manor is his last chance, but even here, despite the unconventional teaching methods, Jean is marked by difference. The other boys are fee-paying, while Jean is on a grant; they have good, English families, while Jean's mother, Rosa, is a German-Jewish refugee and his father is an absent memory. Having broken the rules several times, Jean is on thin ice. But there is only one summer to get through and then Jean will pass his exams and get out.
All of a sudden, he is befriended by Tom―confident, charming, buoyed by years of good breeding and privilege―and it seems as if Jean's world might change. When things turn romantic, Jean is tipped into a heady, overwhelming infatuation. Now Jean skips class to venture into the woods, or sneaks across moonlit fields to see Tom, wondering whether the relationship might offer a way out of a life marked by alienation. But what if the only true path to freedom is to disappear altogether
Spellbinding and evocative, Jean is a meditative narrative of loss and escape distilled into the heartrending story of an intense and dangerous adolescent love.
"Bruising, interesting, occasionally sublime." —Kirkus Reviews
"There's something uncanny in Madeleine Dunnigan's austerely beautiful prose, in how what begins as a character study takes on a cosmic scale. Jean is a darkly luminous, profound novel; there are passages that give the shock of the genuinely great. An extraordinary debut." ―Garth Greenwell, author of Small Rain
"Madeleine Dunnigan is an important new voice in fiction. She tells this most unique coming-of-age story with strength and delicacy, emotion and precision. Jean is a gift." ―Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Here I Am
"Jean utterly transported me. This coming-of-age novel has an unexpected and powerful undertow, revealing itself to be a story of unresolved loss and eventual erasure. Madeleine Dunnigan writes such beautifully tempered prose, and hers is an exquisite debut." ―Katie Kitamura, author of Audition
This information about Jean 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.
Madeleine Dunnigan was a Jill Davis Fellow in the MFA program at New York University. While there she was awarded a Global Reporting Initiative Fellowship in Paris. She lives in London, where she was born and raised.
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