The Truants

A thrilling and seductive debut about obsession, rivalry and coming of age on a college campus, for readers of Agatha Christie and The Secret History.

'Where do I find Crime?'

'Crime doesn't have its own section,' said the librarian without looking up. 'It's all under fiction.'

Jess Walker heads to an East Anglian university to be taught by Dr Lorna Clay, a brilliant and enigmatic literature professor. She can't believe her luck when she ends up in Lorna's Agatha Christie seminar in her first term, and more so when Lorna begins to take an evident interest in her. While Jess is pulled deeper into Lorna's orbit, she also connects with another acolyte, sexy and fun-loving Georgie, and Georgie's boyfriend, Alex, a South African journalist-in-exile whose stories captivate her.

As the action moves from the flat grey skies of the university campus to a house in the hills on a Mediterranean island, loyalties shift, and Jess's experience of infatuation and betrayal, disappearance and loss gives way to a breathless search for the truth. Unsettling, intriguing and amusing, The Truants is a compulsively readable literary debut about the nature of deceit and the depths to which obsession can drive us.