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Oligarchy

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Oligarchy

By: Scarlett Thomas
Narrated by: Scarlett Thomas
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A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN EVENING STANDARD and METRO

When Tash, daughter of a Russian oligarch, is sent to an English boarding school, she is new to the strange rituals of the girls there. Theirs is a world of strict pecking orders, eating disorders and Instagram angst.

While she spends her time with the other girls at the lake and the stables, a hand-picked few are invited to join the Headmaster at his house for extra lessons. Then her friend Bianca mysteriously vanishes, and quickly the routines of her dorm-mates seem darker and more alien than ever before.

Oligarchy is the fierce new novel about power, privilege and peer pressure from the bestselling author of The End of Mr. Y.

 Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction
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Critic reviews

"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)
"Thomas’s humour has a sharp, rhythmic perfection. Her prose is fast-thinking, entertaining and punchy, her dialogue fully authentic . . . Intriguing, fluid and frequently funny"
"Wickedly funny . . . Thomas has great fun with the familiar components of the boarding school yarn, even as she subverts them. Her writing is spikily humorous and controlled . . . This jet-black novel begs to be dramatised"
"Oligarchy is a delicious slap in the face; stunningly intelligent, alarmingly modern, hilariously funny, deeply pertinent, true, fantastical and several hankies’-worth of poignant" (LOUISA YOUNG)
"Riotously funny . . . There are few more vivaciously original novelists around today, and surely none of them is having as much fun while making serious points . . . Quite brilliant . . . There have been many other notable novels about schools . . . but none so entertaining since Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie"
"Wrapping a murder mystery in a wicked comedy of manners, this instantly engaging novel untangles the perverse contradictions of how society contrives to fear, ignore and fetishise teenage girls. Viciously funny, with a killer turn of phrase"
"An intricate black jewel of a novel. Weeks later I’m still thinking about it" (KIRSTY LOGAN)
"Great fun, a knowing satire of British private schoolgirls, their snobberies and obsessions, and especially their body-image anxieties . . . Thomas clearly knows how to craft a very funny sentence, and has profound insight into the issues she is writing about"
"This is the boarding school novel in the age of #thinspo, Instagram, blockchain and the dark web, all written in Thomas’s lush and funny style"
"Slippery, spiky comic horror that has a lot of dark fun satirising the relentless cultural objectification of female bodies, the garish inadequacies of rich but absent parents and the ruthless competitive nature of female relationships . . . Mordantly entertaining"
All stars
Most relevant
I've read a lot of books by Scarlett Thomas and this is very different but utterly riveting.

Unusual departure

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read by the author, who I'd have expected to put feeling into her characters, but it was read without expression. And the story was just ridiculous, over done and unbelievable.

A pile of tripe

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Scarlett Thomas is one of my favourite writers and this is certainly a well written book. But if I’d leafed through it in a shop I wouldn’t have bought it. There’s some unintended irony in the deliberately ironic description of supposedly ‘anti anorexia’ talks as undercover promotion of eating disorders when the book itself is doing that - long beautifully written descriptions of the means and ends of anorexia in 15 year old girls. I found it troubling to read and didn’t think there was enough substance to offset that much revelling in the details of teenage starvation. This might be an old fashioned, moralistic take, but I don’t think this book adds anything to life or the world, it’s just a literary equivalent of scrolling through the darker corners of pro ana instagram.

Wouldn’t read again

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