Rehearsal

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.

As debuts go, this one is astral - as well as teasing, intelligent and knowing ... Catton anatomizes brilliantly the psychology of youth, its sexual mores, it's posing pretentiousness, its worries, its bravado ... So much accomplishment carried so lightly, It represents a starburst of talent and the arrival of an author wholly different from anyone else writing today, A supremely confident piece of writing ... the clarity of its thought and language make it a definite contender for debut of the year, Brilliant ... What Catton does so strikingly, and in such honeyed prose, is to capture the essence of adolescents ... Catton has formidable talent, Time-frames 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

ELEANOR CATTON is the author of Birnam Wood (Granta, 2023), shortlisted for the Orwell Prize; The Luminaries (Granta, 2013), winner of the Man Booker Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award; and The Rehearsal (Granta, 2009), winner of a Betty Trask Award, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the Orange Prize. As a screenwriter, she adapted The Luminaries for television, and Jane Austen's Emma for feature film. In 2023 she was named as one of Granta magazine's Best of Young British Novelists. Born in 1985 in Canada and raised in New Zealand, she now lives in Cambridge, England.