The Rehearsal

A high-school sex scandal sets the stage for an exhilarating reflection on sexuality, performance, and the flare and tumult of adolescence, in the Booker-Prize winning author's dazzlingly assured, provocative debut 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.