![]() What is missing is a wider sense of what these people are trying to protect themselves from. ![]() The novel is nicely poised between the intellectual and the commercial, and is an enjoyable page-turner. People remembering or experiencing their own twenties will feel many pangs of recognition at her dramatic depiction of how the ferment of lust, ambition, sympathy and silliness continues well after the teenage years. Whitehouse has already garnered praise from masters of suspense. Only Jo, shy and asthmatic, senses anything sinister about the place, which is exquisitely furnished and painted with a scene of Zeus surrounded by gods. On New Year's Eve, Lucas's five friends – Jo, Danny, Rachel, Martha and Michael, plus Rachel's new boyfriend Greg – come down to party and inspect the house. A classics degree at Oxford has introduced her to her best friend, Lucas, who has just inherited a "Cotswold-stone pile" from his glamorous art dealer uncle, Patrick. ![]() ![]() Jo, the narrator, is the daughter of two English teachers. Lucie Whitehouse's debut novel is the most recent of this genre. Ever since Brideshead Revisited, novels about "framily" (friends who replace family) formed at an elite university have abounded both here and in the US, with Donna Tartt's The Secret History as a kind of apogee. The family, as the Greeks knew well, is the source of all the best drama, but modern fiction tends to locate this in friendship. ![]()
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