Enter for a chance to win one of thirty copies of OLIGARCHY, a novel by Scarlett Thomas!One of the Evening Standard's Best Books of the Year "A fast, fizzy read . . . Entertaining, irreverent and wrong-hilarious . . . Hugely enjoyable. It’s about as menacing as a cool girl’s black glitter nail polish—and just as much fun." —Bidisha, The Observer "A darkly comic tale about the tribulations of the daughter of a Russian oligarch sent to an English boarding school." —Martin Chilton, Independent "Thomas’s quirky, darkly funny novel lifts the lid on the ways of teenage girls in the intense surroundings of a boarding school." —Eithne Farry, The Daily Mail

Oligarchy

It’s already the second week of term when Natasha, the daughter of a Russian oligarch, arrives at a vast English country house for her first day of boarding school. She soon discovers that the headmaster gives special treatment to the skinniest girls, and Natasha finds herself thrown into the school’s unfamiliar, moneyed world of fierce pecking orders, eating disorders, and Instagram angst. When her friend Bianca mysteriously vanishes, the world of the school gets ever darker and stranger.   The halls echo with the story of Princess Augusta, the White Lady whose portraits―featuring a hypnotizing black diamond―hang everywhere. She fell in love with a commoner and drowned herself in the lake, and her ghost is said to haunt the dorms. But the girls don’t really know anything about the woman she was, much less anything about each other.   Hilariously dark,  Oligarchy  is  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie  for the digital age. Scarlett Thomas captures the lives of privileged teenage girls seeking to be loved and accepted in all their triviality and magnitude. With the help of her diet-obsessed classmates, Tash must try to stay alive―and sane―while she uncovers what’s really going on.

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