Avigayl Sharp’s debut novel is a deranged satire about the culture of trauma. The unnamed narrator is a young woman working as a teacher at a girls’ boarding school in a small American coastal town. Her class, ‘The Literature of the City’, has a single set text: Bleak House. She pontificates about it and Charles Dickens as well as (in a nod to Miss Jean Brodie) Stalin, intergenerational trauma, genocide and the difference between paedophilia and ephebophilia. Her unfiltered commentary is full of physiological oversharing and perfunctory references to political sensitivities. Sharp writes that which is normally left unwritten and some may find the shock factor overwhelming. Others will find it refreshingly honest. 

As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the narrator’s grim intellectual preoccupations, which initially appear to be harmless vestiges of an abandoned PhD, are in fact part of a defence mechanism, self-protection from her own trauma. The closest we get to uncovering the source of her anguish is when