SOME BOOKS ARE worth the wait. When his current publisher was not even a gleam in anyone's eye, Tobias Wolff's UK editor, Liz Calder, on the basis of some extraordinary short stories, Hunters in the Snow, commissioned his first novel. Around twenty years later, and having moved from Cape to help found Bloomsbury, she publishes it. Old School is a beautifully written and utterly captivating novel, which is what one would expect from a literary master such as Tobias Wolff.

The unnamed narrator looks back from the vantage point of adulthood to tell the story of hs years at a New England prep school at the beginning of the 1960s. The school has a tradition for things literary so it is no wonder that the headmaster has studied with Robert