Although he does not share the new Head’s vision for the School, Straitley views Buckfast as a worthy opponent, and looks forward to taking up her challenge – that is, until a group of pupils report finding what looks like human remains on the site of a new building project. Now, as Head, she reveals herself to be a genuine force for change.
Rebecca Buckfast is not new to the School, having been part of the Crisis Team brought in the previous year to try to turn the School’s fortunes around. This year, new challenges await not least the death and subsequent disgrace of Straitley’s best friend, Eric Scoones, plus the arrival of girls in the School, and the appointment of a Headmistress, the first in the School’s 500-year history. One year has passed since the events of DIFFERENT CLASS, in which Straitley was forced to confront his past, as that year’s New Head was revealed to be the toxic ex-pupil responsible for one of the darkest episodes of St Oswald’s history.
Read here for a summary of GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS. The book can be read as a standalone, but if you need them, there are summaries of the previous books here. This is the last of a trio of novels set in St Oswald’s Grammar School (GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS and DIFFERENT CLASS), featuring Roy Straitley, the elderly and quixotic Latin Master, and his personal battle against Suits, e-mail, parents and the passage of time.Īre you studying A NARROW DOOR with your reading group? Here’s my handy reading-group guide (including themed snacks to aid debate!)
You won’t regret opening it, and walking through. It’s irresistibly readable, dark and brilliant with a masterful emotional punch. ‘A Narrow Door’ is a compulsive journey through the dark places of the human mind, where memory, truth and fact melt away like mirages. I am forty-three years old, and finally I am starting to reap the harvest my ambitions have sown. I have committed two murders one a crime of passion, the other, a crime of convenience. I fought for my place every step of the way, through prejudice, sexism and judgement. I entered teaching at twenty-three, in a school very like St Oswald’s. I had my daughter at seventeen without ever naming the father.
I have survived more setbacks than you could ever imagine. “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” (Matthew 7:14)
0 kommentar(er)
