Excerpt from The Truants by Kate Weinberg, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I nearly laughed. Thanks for that, Georgie. "She's gone home for a few days."

"Oh?" He hesitated for a moment. "To see her boyfriend?"

I shrugged. "I haven't checked her schedule."

He raised his hands defensively. "Right." He looked at me again, as if being forced to read instructions on a manual that he'd hoped he could bypass. "Remind me your name?"

I looked at the weak, handsome face, his shirt belted into pressed jeans. Minor public school, I hazarded. Father's a chauvinist. Lazy worldview.

"The answer is, 'I don't know.'"

"You don't know what?"

"I don't know whether Georgie has a boyfriend."

The lobes of his ears went pink, but he managed to pull himself together in time to laugh it off. "I'm sure she has. Just tell her Max stopped by, will you?"

After he left, I reread the email a couple of times, the cursor hovering over the "send" icon. It was a stupid letter, a childish, petulant letter, written on the back of four days of stomach flu and a wobbly trip to the bar that Georgie had talked me into "because there's only so much Ava Gardner you can get away with before you become Howard Hughes." I had written it for myself really, not actually to send. It was only because it was a Sunday and the administration office was closed, leaving me no place to vent my disappointment, that I had even thought of hunting through the university website to get Dr. Lorna Clay's email address. Then I looked over at my copy of The Truants alone on the shelf above the built-in desk-its pages so well-thumbed that it wouldn't close properly-and thought, Fuck it, what have I got to lose? And with a sudden rush of adrenaline, clicked the mouse.

As soon as I snapped shut my laptop, regret settled over me like an itchy blanket.

And then the itch sank deeper into my bones as I felt myself being dragged backward in time. Back to Boxing Day at home nine months before, with my sister scowling on the sofa as my father made bad jokes about her boyfriend (Dan Pike: plenty more fish in the sea), not understanding that being dumped over Christmas when you're twenty-one doesn't call for a punch line, much less a pun-my dad, who painted fantastical figures in the shed at the end of our garden but left his imagination locked up there, and my older brother, smirking as he stroked the knobby spine of our chocolate Lab, Gladstone, by the fire, and the twins not giving a shit, and my mother not really listening, much less caring, so that in the end I had stood up and walked out.

And the thing I happened to have in my hand as I walked into the kitchen, a book we had been given at Christmas by Uncle Toto, of all people. That feeling when I read the first few pages of The Truants, my bum warm against the stove and the smell of mince pies, like hot tar, in the air-a book that should have been cleverly irrelevant at best, a book about some drunk, dead writers. Literary criticism-when the hell did that change anyone's life, for God's sake? Except it did, mine. And I knew it would, almost from the first paragraph, because Lorna's voice pulled me in and down, like a riptide carrying you underwater and far out to sea so that when, about page five, I flipped to the author picture on the back and saw her clever, beautiful face and read the sentence about where she taught, I thought: Here she is at last. The person who will take me out of this small, airless world before the banality chokes me.

The rooms in Halls all had narrow floor-to-ceiling windows. I stood up to open mine, then remembered you couldn't. To discourage suicides, I thought, looking at the gray paving slabs below.

Under a flat morning sky, a stream of people was walking away from the zigzag-shaped residence halls, across the scrubby grass toward the gray cinder blocks that made up the back of the canteen. Without the glowing prospect of Lorna's teaching, I was confronted by the drab reality of where I would be living for the next three years: a concrete shithole in the middle of flat, windswept Norfolk on what-if you looked at a map-actually was the bulging arse of the United Kingdom.

Excerpted from The Truants by Kate Weinberg. Copyright © 2020 by Kate Weinberg. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.