Fall

A place of pressure and contradictions, St Ebury is an exclusive boarding school for the children of Canada’s elite, where boys must act as men while navigating their adolescence; a mixed school with only a handful of girls. Fall is the most beautiful. At night the bathrooms and beds hum with thoughts of her. Noel, a clever, ghostly loner, prowls the corridors at weekends, filling spare hours working on his body-building. Watching her, always knowing where she is and who she’s talking to, he is certain that one day Fall will come to know him deeply. But like everyone else, she is drawn to Julius, the confident and magnetic son of the American ambassador to Canada. They fall in love. Noel keeps watching, happy to see them together. Fall deserves someone like that, for a while. At the beginning of their final year, the two boys room together. Julius grows physically closer to Fall, while Noel’ boisterous enthusiasm shades into something darker as he imagines himself as a confidante to his popular roommate, sensing that the time has come for him to enter Fall’s life for ever. A disturbing and unforgettable story of guilt, memory and confused identity, Colin McAdam’s second novel is a work of power, pitch-perfect observation and searing ambition. It confirms his status as a truly unique talent, one of the few living novelists capable of taking the modern novel and forging from it something startling and wholly new.