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The new novel from the acclaimed poet and publisher asks fundamental questions about love and sex, friendship and rivalry, desire and power, and the age-old dance of benevolence and attraction between teacher and student.
Sam Brandt is a long-term denizen of Connecticut's renowned Leverett School. As an English teacher he has dedicated his life to providing his students with the same challenges, encouragement, and sense of possibility that helped him and his friends become themselves here half a lifetime ago.
Then Leverett's headmaster asks Sam to help investigate a charge brought by one of his classmates that he was abused by a teacher. Sam is flooded with memories, above all of his overwhelming love for his friend Eddie and the support of his most inspiring mentor, Theodore Gibson.
Sam's search for the truth becomes a quest to get at the heart of Leverett, then and now. The school has changed enormously over the years, but at its core lie assumptions about privilege and responsibility untested for more than a century. And Sam's assumptions about his own life are shaken, too, as he struggles to understand what really happened all those years ago.
"Fascinating…[a] beautifully conceived and written novel." - Booklist (starred review)
"Publisher and poet Galassi's emotionally resonant latest chronicles an English instructor's complicated relationship with his Connecticut boarding school...Galassi's talent for crisp and moving storytelling is again on display, elegantly turning on themes of truth, loyalty, and the ways in which his protagonist's capacity for self-deception override his desire to enjoy an 'unlived life.' This heartful novel packs a punch." - Publishers Weekly
"While the novel could have benefited from the elimination of some peripheral characters, Galassi's understated style and economical prose are well suited to this elegiac story. A thoughtful exploration of the lingering effects of repressed sexual identity." - Kirkus Reviews
"Engulfing…[Galassi] crafts supple sentences with atavistic touches…[a] big-impact little novel." - Shelf Awareness
"In School Days, Jonathan Galassi gives us a novel of change, loss, and liberation. It's a look at a private school in the 1960s, a world of privilege and erudition on the cusp of upheaval. But it's also the story of a man finding his hard-won truth, a gift that enables him to clearly see his boyhood friends—and himself—for the first time. Brilliant, wise, and wistful." - Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She's Not There and Good Boy
"Nostalgia, desire, and the treachery of long-held secrets collide in this absorbing psychological mystery set amid the casual cruelties of privilege and youth. Though no one is murdered, heroes are toppled, illusions shattered, and Galassi's protagonist unearths not just a scandal but painful truths all his own. This is the kind of satisfying story whose final revelations send you rushing right back to the start." - Julia Glass, National Book Award–winning author of Three Junes and Vigil Harbor
This information about School Days was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jonathan Galassi is the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and the author of three collections of poetry, as well as acclaimed translations of the Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. A former Guggenheim Fellow and poetry editor of The Paris Review, he also writes for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and other publications.
Name Pronunciation
Jonathan Galassi: guh-LAH-see
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