Fall
By (Author) Colin McAdam
Vintage Publishing
Vintage
1st June 2010
United Kingdom
Professional and Scholarly
Fiction
Independent schools, private education
813.6
Paperback
336
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 21mm
231g
A twisted love story set in an elite boarding school that is as darkly compelling as it is subtle and profound. A place of pressure and contradictions, St Ebury is an exclusive boarding school for the children of Canada's elite, where boys must act as men while navigating their adolescence. One of only a handful of girls at the school, Fall is the most beautiful. Noel, a clever, ghostly loner, watches her, certain that one day Fall will come to know him deeply. But like everyone else, she is drawn to Julius, the confident and magnetic son of the American ambassador to Canada. They fall in love and Noel keeps watching. In their final year, the boys room together and as Julius grows closer to Fall, Noel's enthusiasm for their relationship shades into something darker as he imagines himself as a confidante to Julius, sensing that the time has come for him to enter Fall's life forever.
A sensitive, honest and horrifying portrait of everyday life in an elite, expensive boarding school -- Josh Lacey * Guardian *
The intensity of the passions depicted in the novel is not so much matched by the writing itself as generated by it... In it we experience, like a new discovery, the appalling kinship between uncontrollable love and equally uncontrollable lovelessness -- Paul Binding * Times Literary Supplement *
Experimental and certainly ambitious -- Doug Johnstone * Big Issue *
Colin McAdam lives in Montreal. His first novel, Some Great Thing, was published in 2004.