Books like Autumn Term

I don't know how I managed never to discover Forest when I was younger, but I'm glad to find her now. She was recommended to me by some friends on-line, and four books kindly sent to me by a friend in England. They are hard to find here—I don't know why the heck they are not in constant print. At the front introduction of one, an old friend of hers speculates that critics scorned her for her first book being a 'school story'—a type that fell into disrepute earlier in the twentieth century, due to its extreme popularity, and the almost rigid storylines and character types so many writers churned out. (George Orwell had some fascinating—and excoriating—things to say about School Stories in some of his posthumously published essays. I happen to think school stories are fascinating, and have studied them rather a lot, but this is not the place to get into that.) Anyway, out of 14 books, apparently only 4 are considered school stories, if I got that right.In Autumn Term, Forest does not pay any attention to accepted character types or storylines. You cannot predict what will happen—her characters are distinct, even the minor ones. Her prose is beautiful.