The Rehearsal

Description

‘As debuts go, this one is astral – as well as teasing, intelligent and knowing – Catton anatomises brilliantly the psychology of youth, its sexual mores, it’s posing pretentiousness, its worries, its bravado – So much accomplishment carried so lightly’ – Scotsman

‘Timeframes overlap and collide in this ingenious ontological kaleidoscope of a debut, but the experimentalism – which demands that the reader keep all her wits about her – is tempered by a real knack for narrative and a cast of painfully familiar teenage characters who are all desperate to be as confident, cool, charismatic and funny as possible. These are qualities that the extraordinary Eleanor Catton has in spades’ – The Times

A high-school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency and power. The publicity seems to turn every act into a performance and every platform into a stage. But when the local drama school decides to turn the scandal into a show, the real world and the world of the theatre are forced to meet, and soon the boundaries between private and public begin to dissolve … The Rehearsal is an exhilarating and provocative novel about the unsimple mess of human desire, at once a tender evocation of its young protagonists and a shrewd expose of emotional compromise.