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When We Were Monsters

£9.99

Eight students walk into an exclusive writers’ retreat, but only one will walk out with a life-changing opportunity to realise their creative dreams.

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ISBN: 9780241772492 Category: Children's - Young Readers Tags: Children's / Teenage fiction: Romance & relationships stories, Children's / Teenage fiction: Thrillers, Children's / Teenage personal & social issues: death & bereavement, Children's / Teenage personal & social issues: Sexuality & relationships
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Description

The compulsive new thriller from multimillion-copy bestselling author Jennifer Niven.

Eight students walk into an exclusive writers’ retreat, but only one will walk out with a life-changing opportunity to realize their creative dreams.

Effy is piecing together a story about the tragic betrayal that led to her mother’s death. Arlo hopes to publish a novel – but he’s also trying to start a new chapter with Effy after he broke her heart and ghosted her three years earlier.

Their mentor is Meredith Graffam, enigmatic writer, director and actress, whose compelling accounts of her own near-death experience on the same retreat decades before continue to spark controversy.

But this celebrated teacher is not all she seems, and her students gradually realize they are fighting for something much more primal than academic advantage. As Graffam’s unorthodox teaching methods push them past breaking point, they reveal their darkest secrets, take unthinkable risks and slowly start to turn on one another. But Graffam never expected they would turn on her . . .

The Secret History meets One of Us is Lying in the most gripping thriller of the year.

Read a sample here

Additional information

Weight 0.281 kg
Dimensions 19.7 × 12.8 × 2.4 cm
Author

Niven, Jennifer

Publisher

Penguin Books

Imprint

Penguin Books

Cover

Paperback

Pages

384

Language

English

Edition

Paperback original

Dewey

813.6 (edition:23)

Readership

Children – juvenile / Code: J

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House of Books and Friends is thrilled to welcome Hélène Giannecchini to discuss her book ‘An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail’. The evening will entail a discussion, a Q&A, and the opportunity to get your book signed by Hélène Giannecchini!

24th March @ 6pm

Roving from Saint-Just’s revolutionary ideal of amity to Donna Gottschalk’s photography documenting radical lesbian organizing in 1960s and ’70s New York, interspersed with images acquired magpie-like through chance and circumstance, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail forms a slantwise account of queer life in the twentieth century, and a moving testament to the liberatory power of friendship.

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Sometimes, all you need is books 🥰

Come visit us on 81 King Street and share in the wonder of books!

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The wonderful thing about bookselling is that you get to have a sneak peak at some of the new titles coming out in the upcoming year. We asked our booksellers which titles had them giddy with excitement, and boy were they pumped to deliver...
💛Cecile Pin: Celestial Lights (26 Mar)
🖤Naoko Higashi: The Soul-Catchers (19 Mar)
💛Brandon Taylor: Minor Black Figures (19 March)
🖤Kate Zamreno: Animal Stories (9 Apr)
💛 Douglas Stuart: John of John (21 May)
🖤Tom Rob Smith: Twenty Years Together (9 Apr)
💛Lee Heejoo: Holy Boy (5th Feb)
🖤Tara Menon: Under Water (12 Mar)
💛Joyful, Anyway: Kate Bowel (9 Apr)

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House of Books & Friends is thrilled to welcome Adam Farrer to discuss his paperback book, ‘Broken Biscuits; and Other Male Failures’. The evening will involve a discussion, a Q&A, and a chance to get your book signed by Adam Farrer.
📆 17th February
🕑 6pm

Broken Biscuits vividly recounts Adam’s struggles to live up to masculine expectations, real or imagined. From the calamity of his first serious relationship to an obsession with Prince that sees everyone questioning his sexuality, and from the repercussions of his adult circumcision to his doubts about his ability to survive the apocalypse, this candid and personal collection of essays is astonishingly far-reaching and riotously funny.

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January goodbyes from some of the HoBaf family. We are super sad to be leaving, it's been an absolute pleasure ~ thank you! Come and say goodbye before we go 💕

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Our bookseller Lydia leaves us this week with her absolute favourite book to recommend: Ice by Anna Kavan! 

Ice is the kind of book you experience, rather than read. Brian Aldiss infamously called Kavan ‘Kafka’s sister’; this would be the case only if Kafka’s sister was more interesting and bizarre. This book is THE novel of twentieth-century dislocation, a fragmented, hallucinatory, incisive masterpiece. The plot (if it can be said to have one) triangulates between a monomaniacal narrator,  a powerful ‘Warden’, and an unnamed, albinic ‘girl’ as they try to evade an encroaching glacial apocalypse. But story isn’t important, here – what matters is that you can open the book to any page and find some of the most beautiful, insane writing ever put to paper. It’s maybe the best book ever written. PLEASE READ IT.


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